Quotes about materialism

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

— Charles Baudelaire

The best things in life aren't things.

— Art Buchwald

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

— Thomas Carlyle

There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair.

— Frank A. Clark

It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.

— Robert A. Cook

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

— Guy Debord

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

— Edward M. Forster

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

— Erich Fromm

Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.

— Mahatma Gandhi

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.

— Oliver Goldsmith

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

— Hesiod

Materialism is the only form of distraction from true bliss.

— Doug Horton

The essence of worldliness is exclusion of God.

— Henry Jacobsen

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

— William James

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

— John Maynard Keynes

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

— Herbert Marcuse

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

— Mary Mccarthy

Somebody said to me, But the Beatles were anti-materialistic. That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, Now, let's write a swimming pool.

— Paul Mccartney

Oh, what a void there is in things.

— Persius

As there is no worldly gain without some loss so there is no worldly loss without some gain.

— Quarius

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

There must be more to life than having everything.

— Maurice Sendak

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

— Mark Twain

Junk is something you keep for years and then throw out two weeks before you need it.

— Source Unknown

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

— Source Unknown

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

— John Updike

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

— Raoul Vaneigem

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

— Raoul Vaneigem

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. H. P. Blavatsky

— Helena Petrova Blavatsky