materialism Quotes

“These people were so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.”

“Part of the problem . . . is that everyone is in such a hurry. . . . People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find these things are empty, too, and they keep running.”

“Be not anxious! Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of all anxiety.”

“You look... amazing!” And I have to say, I agree. I’m wearing all black - but expensive black. The kind of deep, soft black that you fall into. A simple sleeveless dress from Whistles, the highest of Jimmy Choos, a pair of stunning uncut amethyst earrings. And please don’t ask how much it all cost, because that’s irrelevant. This is investment shopping. The biggest investment of my life. I haven’t eaten anything all day so I’m nice and thin and for once my hair has fallen perfectly into shape. I look... well, I’ve never looked better in my life. But of course, looks are only part of the package, aren’t they?”

“As I stare at it,I can feel little invisible strings, silently tugging me toward it. I have to touch it. I have to wear it. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”

“Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.”

“As she’s laying it out on the tissue paper, I take out my purse, open it up, and reach for my VISA card in one seamless, automatic action--but my fingers hit bare leather. I stop in surprise and start to rummage through all the pockets of my purse, wondering if I stuffed my card back in somewhere with a receipt or if it’s hidden underneath a business card...and them with a sickening thud, I remember. It’s on my desk.”

“There is no question. I have to have this scarf. I have to have it. It makes my eyes look bigger, it makes my haircut look more expensive, it makes me look like a different person. I’ll be able to wear it with everything. People will refer to me as the Girl in the Denny and George Scarf.”

“So many people say, ‘Oh, I’m not interested in money.’ Yet they’ll work at a job for eight hours a day.”

“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”

“A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes.”

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

“If you don’t care about money, Nina dear, call it by its other names.” “Kruge? Scrub? Kaz’s one true love?” “Freedom, security, retribution.”

“Although Lasaraleen had said she was dying to hear Aravis’s story, she showed no sign of really wanting to hear it at all. She was, in fact, much better at talking than at listening... The fuss she made about choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad. She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip.”

“She’d been taking care of his material needs for a good year and a half, and his emotional ones, to the extent he wanted them taken care of, for almost as long. ‘I love him as if I birthed him,’ she said.”

“Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me.”

“I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them.”

“Well, however, I lugg’d this Money home to my Cave, and laid it up, as I had done that before, which I brought from our own Ship; but it was great Pity as I said, that the other Part of this Ship had not come to my Share; for I am satisfy’d I might have loaded my Canoe several Times over with Money, which if I had ever escap’d to England, would have lain here safe enough, till I might have come again and fetch’d it.”

“You are to understand, that now I had, as I may call it, two Plantations in the Island; one my little Fortification or Tent, with the Wall about it under the Rock, with the Cave behind me, which by this Time I had enlarg’d into several Apartments or Caves, one within another. One of these, which was the driest, and largest, and had a Door out beyond my Wall or Fortification; that is to say, beyond where my Wall joyn’d to the Rock, was all fill’d up with the large Earthen Pots, of which I have given an Account, and with fourteen or fifteen great Baskets, which would hold five or six Bushels each, where I laid up my Stores of Provision, especially my Corn.”

“It is impossible to express here the Flutterings of my very Heart, when I look’d over these Letters, and especially when I found all my Wealth about me; for as the Brasil Ships come all in Fleets, the same Ships which brought my Letters, brought my Goods; and the Effects were safe in the River before the Letters came to my Hand.”

“Besides this, I shard’d the Island into Parts with ‘em, reserv’d to myself the Property of the whole, but gave them such Parts respectively as they agreed on; and having settled all things with them, and engaged them not to leave the Place, I left them there.”

“What’s so good about being 20? I call them the materialistic years. The years we get distracted by all the bullshit. Then we cope on when we hit our 30s and spend those years trying to make up for the 20s. But your 40s? Those years are for enjoying it.”

“When you lose your desire for things that do not matter, you will be free.”

“If you must be careless with your possessions, let it be in connection with material things.”

″It’s been said a million times that the most important things aren’t things. But if we’re not careful, it seems, many of us find ourselves overwhelmed by all the stuff we have to manage, instead of focused on what we’re most passionate about—writing or making or painting or connecting with people.″

“Here it is. Here’s the love. Here’s the love: it’s in marriage and parenting. It’s in family and friends. It’s in sacrifice and forgiveness. It’s in dinner around the coffee table and long walks. It’s in the hands and faces of the people we see every day, in the whispers of our prayers and hymns and songs. It’s in our neighborhoods and churches, our classrooms and living rooms, on the water and in the stories we tell.And let me tell you where it’s not: it’s not in numbers—numbers in bank accounts, numbers on scales, numbers on report cards or credit scores.″

“The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily.”

“I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hopes that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!—Which it never can be.”

“When you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it’s can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS”

“You and I have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look already!”

“Crass materialism sustains very few marriages. The vestiges of God’s vision for marriage remain. They may be distorted and nameless, but they still remain. God’s common grace grants many cut flowers to flourish for a lifetime.”

“Material poverty, spiritual richness.”

“Brody is the toy that all the other kids want to own, so obviously Selah wants to be the one to lock him down. He’s a fill-in-the-blank... it could be a purse, a car, a trip, a new pair of shoes. She’s constantly in pursuit of shiny things, and well, he is very shiny.”

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy’s excitement.

“It was a hobby with him, collecting clothes. If he’d had half a dozen houses, they would all have been full of a complete gentleman’s town and country outfit.”

My life belongs to my cash.

“Luxury has everything.”

Those gilded cashbooks, drawers locked like gates of fortresses, heaps of bank-bills, come from I know not where, and the quantities of letters from England, Holland, Spain, India, China, and Peru, have generally a strange influence on a father’s mind, and make him forget that there is in the world an interest greater and more sacred than the good opinion of his correspondents.

and beneath them, in turn, are five million farmers’ wives reading ‘fashion papers’ and trimming bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-skin robes.

I had got on so fast of late, that I had even started a boy in boots,—top boots,—in bondage and slavery to whom I might have been said to pass my days. For, after I had made the monster (out of the refuse of my washerwoman’s family), and had clothed him with a blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.

“Of course, there can be no objection to your being sorry for him, and I’d put down a five-pound note myself to get him out of it. But what I look at is this. The late Compeyson having been beforehand with him in intelligence of his return, and being so determined to bring him to book, I do not think he could have been saved. Whereas, the portable property certainly could have been saved. That’s the difference between the property and the owner, don’t you see?”