Materialism Quotes

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.

Jess C. Scott

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Benjamin Disraeli

I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....

Thomas Nagel

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

But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was dong in the reader's heart?

Stephen King

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

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

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

George Eliot

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

Kahlil Gibran

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Bertrand Russell

Television it will keep your a-s wishin' forever.

Ice Cube

The less I needed the better I felt.

Charles Bukowski

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy s--t we don't need.

Tyler Durden

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

Tyler Durden

Riches come forth from one who owns little, while another of material wealth turns penniless.

Al-Kindi

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Kurt Vonnegut

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Henry David Thoreau

What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Henry David Thoreau