#materialism

You can never have too much money. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#lottery #lottery-tickets #materialism #materialism-versus-spiritualism #money

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson ↗

— John Steinbeck

#nature

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us. ↗

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

#materialism #nature

Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#animism #beatdom #environmentalism #materialism-versus-spiritualism #religious-extremism

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. ↗

— H. P. Blavatsky

#chief #difficulty #divine #materialism #men

That feeling of freedom, open highways of possibilities, has kind of been lost to materialism and marketing. ↗

— Sheryl Crow

#feeling #freedom #highways #kind #lost

If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods  …   When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon  …   does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe? ↗

— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

#divinity #gods #ignorance #knowledge #materialism

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously. ↗

— H. L. Mencken

#curse #get #idealism #into #materialism

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited. ↗

— E. F. Schumacher

#because #contains #does #environment #fit

Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home? ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#possessions #technology #travel #beauty