#materialism

I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth "home." Before you know it, I am calling luxeries "needs" and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set. ↗

— John Piper

#fitting-in #materialism #mind-set #missions #money

The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises. ↗

— Ron Suskind

#idolatry #materialism #education

To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible. ↗

— Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

#materialism #contentment

People are too complicated to have simple labels. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#people #materialism

My shoes I got to pick. I chose worn-out red flats. I figured I should make it clear from the start that I wasn’t princess material. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#materialism

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#complicated #deed #evil #good #labels

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#philip-pullman #the-golden-compass #materialism

Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#finances #financial-planning #fool #foolish #hoarding

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

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