#materialism

Materialism is the only form of distraction from true bliss. ↗

— Douglas Horton

#distraction #form #materialism #only #true

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false. ↗

— Henri Frederic Amiel

#everything #false #making #materialism #truth

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society. ↗

— Malcolm Muggeridge

#materialistic #mysticism #only #possible #religion

Happiness will come from materialism, not from meaning. ↗

— Andrei Platonov

#come #materialism #meaning #will

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928) ↗

— Clare Winger Harris

#material-possessions #materialism #possessions #uselessness #wasted-time

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

This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#become #begin #change #culture #cultures

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#communism #consumerism #materialism #experience

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