#material

The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth. ↗

— John Polkinghorne

#been #billion #chemical #earth #enable

But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#life #loving-relationship #materialism #satisfaction #truth

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. ↗

— David Craig

#atheists #biologists #friedrich-engels #god #humanists

I don't like Paradise, As they probably don't have obsessions there. ↗

— Alda Merini

#heaven #materialism #paradise #possessions #afterlife

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#material #pleasure #stuff #capitalism

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want. ↗

— Lyanda Lynn Haupt

#materialism #environmentalism

The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#greed #materialism #needs #selfishness #vice

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

— Bertrand Russell

#freedom #materialism #posessions #freedom

The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#freedom #materialism #poverty #freedom

Dreams shouldn't be about what you can buy--they should be about what mark you leave in the world. ↗

— Claire Cross

#mark-on-the-world #materialism #dreams