#materialism

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town. ↗

— George Saunders

#ascendant #becoming #cloth #dresses #especially

More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode, harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right. ↗

— Jack Schwartz

#assumed #both #dominant #faith #gave

There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents. --"Bomar ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#money-not-happiness #beauty

I think at the heart of so much restlessness of the day is a spiritual vacuum. There is a yearning for meaningful lives, a yearning for values we can commonly embrace. I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses. ↗

— Bill Moyes

#hope #materialism #life

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture... by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair. ↗

— Thomas Nagel

#evolution #id #intelligent-design #macroevolution #materialism

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#christianity #clarity #display #hoarding #horror

The author's projected intellectual climate nearly 500 years in the future proclaims itself too pragmatic to consider living well as important as material satisfaction. This reminds us, ironically, that choosing NOT to consider life's deeper questions is in itself a choice with profound and lasting consequences. ↗

— Bryan M. Litfin

#philosophy #pragmatism #life

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

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

— Alda Merini

#heaven #materialism #paradise #possessions #afterlife

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