#material

Societies need self sacrificing ignorant crowd; Religions need fearful followers; Systems need obedient slaves; Corporate world needs compulsive consumers, and I NEED THE COURAGE TO RISE ABOVE THESE FOUR PARASITES. ↗

— Saurabh Sharma

#fear #inspiration #materialism #rat-race #socierty

I'd much rather buy an experience than something I can possess in the material world ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#experiences #life #materialism #money #spending

Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist. ↗

— Alistair Begg

#christianity #materialism #theology #wealth #faith

The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#dependence-on-god #faith #insurance #material-goods #possessions

I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news ↗

— John Muir

#materialism #mountains #nature #wildness-is-a-necessity #life

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity. ↗

— George Eliot

#materialism #vanity #life

Associated with this inner conflict is a tendency to become hypercritical: unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries. Shut up within themselves, they are necessarily shut off from all others except to criticize them. Since the essence of sin is opposition to God’s will, it follows that the sin of one individual is bound to oppose any other individual whose will is in harmony with God’s will. This resulting estrangement from one’s fellow man is intensified when one begins to live solely for this world, then the possessions of the neighbor are regarded as something unjustly taken from oneself. Once the material becomes the goal of life, a society of conflicts is born. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#spirituality #life

Sophia sat in meditation on the riverbank when a student bent down to place two enormous pearls at her feet as a gift. She opened her eyes to see the pearls. She picked one up, but dropped it. It rolled down the hill upon which she was sitting and into the river. The student chased after it and looked all afternoon, diving, coming up for air, diving back down. “Sophia,” he asked. “Could you show me where it went in? I can’t find it.” “Right there,” she said throwing the other pearl in the river. ↗

— David W. Jones

#letting-go-of-stuff #materialism #wisdom #love

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#materialism #possessions #property #values #men

I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#his-dark-materials #philip-pullman #religion