Quotes about Materialism

They spend their whole earthly existence trying to save, enhance, and enrich their lives. And what happens? They lose the most important things in their life: an intimate relationship with God and with others.

This "world" is marked by three spiritual dynamics that John identifies as "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life" (1 John 2:16).

The desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life.

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

Cash is filling up the holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet and hard to work. He could cut up a tin can and hide the holes and nobody wouldn't know the difference. Wouldn't mind, anyway. I have seen him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it was glass he was working, when he could have reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and drove them into the joint and made it do.

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.

the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

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.

As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.