Materialism Quotes

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt, they are forbidden to believe.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?

~ Leonard Ravenhill

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of coffee shops as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.

~ Edmund White

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

~ Kahlil Gibran

A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.

~ Jane Austen

Some people, when there’s a threat of everything they have being ripped away at a moments notice, they place value on the things they can keep with them, or find anywhere, so they can say ‘these are my things, nobody else can touch them.’

~ Benjamin R. Smith

There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)

~ Clare Winger Harris

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.

~ Richard Wright

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.

~ Wilhelm Von Humboldt

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

~ Thomas Mann

In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

~ George Eliot

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

~ George Eliot

Bread is a second cause; the LORD Himself is the first source of our sustenance. He can work without the second cause as well as with it; and we must not tie Him down to one mode of operation. Let us not be too eager after the visible, but let us look to the invisible God.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

~ Sergio Troncoso

Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.(The Wendigo)

~ Algernon Blackwood

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you're glad somebody else is there to hear it.

~ Paul David Tripp

If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.

~ Wilhelm Von Humboldt

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.

~ Daniel Yergin

We all need new ideas, images, and experiences far more than we need new stoves or cars or computers.

~ Bill Holm

Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tuneWe're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soonCaptains of the old order clinging to the reinsAssuring us these aches inside are only growing painsBut it's a long road out of Eden(...)Behold the bitten apple, the power of the toolsBut all the knowledge in the world is of no use to foolsAnd it's a long road out of Eden

~ Eagles

On this rock we had built our church. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.

~ Ken Macleod

For the genuine materialist there is no fundamental, but only a gradual, an “evolutionary” difference, between man and a pest, a noxious insect

~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The wisdom of nature continues to teach humanity that the material...is immaterial.

~ Jason Versey

Money is a good weapon against the scum and is of no consequence to the noble mind. - On Money.

~ Lamine Pearlheart

But what is the point of buying vegetables in plastic bags? Everything from the supermarket smells of plastic. Everything from the market smells like it’s supposed to.

~ Jinat Rehana Begum

If you are dissatisfied with what you have,Then you will never be satisfied with what you have.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Virtues are worth more than the material things.

~ Sunday Adelaja

I thought suddenly, what is the meaning of all these things? All these bags and bags I've been packing? We could take everything we have with us. We could take every single thing that every single person in the world has ever had. But not of it would mean anything to me. Because no matter how much I took and no no matter how much I had for the rest of my life, I didn't have him anymore. I could have piled everything from here straight to heaven. None of it was him.

~ Cristina Henriquez

Sometimes it didn't seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared to other kids my age, and, believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. Sometimes things didn't add up.

~ Sharon Leach

The materialists, or some of them, would have us believe that the brain produces thoughts as an organ secretes fluids; this is to overlook What constitutes the very essence of thought, namely the materially unexplainable miracle of subjectivity: as if the cause of consciousness - immaterial and non-spatial by definition - could be a material object.

~ Frithjof Schuon

I think everything in the subjective expression of human experience can be traced back to chemistry, biology, and ones family upbringing. Anything considered transcendental is just a lazy way of saying we don't know why something is the way it is, everything is based in materialism. If you really want to be able to read someone, ask about their upbringing and observe how they have react to interpersonal experience. Then, relate those things back to biology. We are unique, yes, but we are not in control of our uniqueness. We're just meat puppets subjected to the chemical reactions which manifest from the force of the Will.

~ Marouane Laassafar

The leaders of thought and of action grope theirway forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly,that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of valueonly as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes fromdevotion to loftier ideals.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

In the long run, success or failure will beconditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very muchhigher.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.

~ Olaf Stapledon