#materialism

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

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order. ↗

— George Eliot

#materialism #life

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#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

The left-hand path adept seeks to liberate him/herself from passive subjection to the illusory nature of Maya, thus freeing the consciousness from the binds of self-created delusion. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#jivanmukta #left-hand-path #materialism-versus-spiritualism #spiritual-transformation #nature

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it. ↗

— Melanie Phillips

#dawkins #god #materialism #naturalism #science

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#again #became #convincing #descent #design

Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#been #management #materialism #never #north

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

But as an adult working in the fashion industry, I struggle with materialism. And I'm one of the least materialistic people that exist, because material possessions don't mean much to me. They're beautiful, I enjoy them, they can enhance your life to a certain degree, but they're ultimately not important. ↗

— Tom Ford

#beautiful #because #certain #certain degree #degree