Materialism

(416 votes)   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
1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer

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(223 votes)   Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Henri Frederic Amiel
1821-1881, Swiss Philosopher, Poet, Critic

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(126 votes)   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
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(117 votes)   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
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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

Oliver Goldsmith
1728-1774, Anglo-Irish Author, Poet, Playwright

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(89 votes)   It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.

Robert A. Cook

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(84 votes)   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
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(80 votes)   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
1821-1867, French Poet

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(79 votes)   There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair.

Frank A. Clark

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(74 votes)   The essence of worldliness is exclusion of God.

Henry Jacobsen

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(72 votes)   As there is no worldly gain without some loss so there is no worldly loss without some gain.

Quarius

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(72 votes)   Oh, what a void there is in things.

Persius
34-62 AD, Satirical Poet

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(72 votes)   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

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(72 votes)   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
1912-1989, American Author, Critic

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(71 votes)   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
1934-, Belgian Situationist Philosopher

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