86 Inspiring Materialism Quotes

In a world often driven by the pursuit of physical possessions, the concept of materialism holds a complex allure. As we navigate through a reality increasingly defined by our attachments to things, it's worthwhile to pause and reflect on what truly matters. Our curated collection of the top 86 inspiring materialism quotes invites you to embark on a journey of introspection and discovery. These insightful thoughts not only challenge the conventional allure of material wealth but also illuminate paths toward understanding deeper values. Whether you find yourself questioning the nature of happiness or seeking a balanced perspective, these quotes offer a rich tapestry of wisdom from thinkers, writers, and visionaries across time. Prepare to be inspired, surprised, and perhaps even transformed in your views on materialism and its place in our lives.

1. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” - Chuck Palahniuk

2. “Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.” - John Ruskin

3. “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for—in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” - Ellen Goodman

4. “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

5. “The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.” - Erich Fromm

6. “That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…” - Jess C. Scott

7. “Diese jungen Menschen hatten keine Wünsche, keine Überzeugungen, geschweige denn Ideale, sie strebten keinen bestimmten Beruf an, wollten weder politischen Einfluss noch eine glückliche Familie, keine Kinder, keine Hausiere und keine Heimat, und sehnten sich ebenso wenig nach Abenteuern und Revolten wie nach der Ruhe und dem Frieden des Althergebrachten. Überdies hatten sie aufgehört, Spaß als einen Wert zu betrachten. Freizeit und Nichtfreizeit waren gleichermaßen anstrengend und unterschieden sich in erster Linie durch die Frage, ob man Geld verdiente oder ausgab. Hobbys zum Totschlagen der Zeit waren überflüssig, da die Zeit auch von selbst verging. Fernsehen war langweilig, die Literaturszene tot, und im Kino liefen seit Jahren nur Varianten auf drei oder vier verschiedener Filme. Diskotheken waren etwas für Liebhaber von Dummheit und schlechter Musik, und auf Schostakowitsch konnte man nicht tanzen. Diese Jugend hatte aufgehört, sich für industriell geschneiderte Moden, Identitäten, Heldenfiguren und Feindbilder zu interessieren. Weniger als jede Generation vor ihrer bildete sie eine Generation. Sie war einfach da, die Sippschaft eines interimistischen Zeitalters. ” - Juli Zeh

8. “The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.” - Chuck Palahniuk

9. “The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.” - Thomas Mann

10. “The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.” - Thomas Mann

11. “There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.” - Samuel Johnson

12. “The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.” - Steven Pinker

13. “The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.” - Adolf Hitler

14. “The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.” - G.K. Chesterton

15. “Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.” - Walter Kaufmann

16. “Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

17. “To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.” - Christopher Hitchens

18. “When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart.{Letter to John Adams, from Monticello, 15 August 1820}” - Thomas Jefferson

19. “An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in thesingle-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into thisworld, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while theenvironment in which it is placed is strictly limited.” - E.F. Schumacher

20. “The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.” - Confucius

21. “The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”(Analects 4.9)” - Confucius

22. “How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.” - Barbara Kingsolver

23. “A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort -- sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine. This state of affairs, which arose out of a struggle against poverty, overshoots its ultimate goal -- the liberation of humanity from material cares -- and becomes an obsessive image hanging over the present. Between love and a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have made their choice and prefer the garbage disposal. A complete and sudden change of spirit has become essential, by bringing to light forgotten desires and creating entirely new ones. And by an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)” - Tom McDonough

24. “Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tuneWe're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soonCaptains of the old order clinging to the reinsAssuring us these aches inside are only growing painsBut it's a long road out of Eden(...)Behold the bitten apple, the power of the toolsBut all the knowledge in the world is of no use to foolsAnd it's a long road out of Eden” - The Eagles

25. “She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.” - Jess C. Scott

26. “Eyes blinded by the fog of thingscannot see truth.Ears deafened by the din of thingscannot hear truth.Brains bewildered by the whirl of thingscannot think truth.Hearts deadened by the weight of thingscannot feel truth.Throats choked by the dust of thingscannot speak truth.” - Harold Bell Wright

27. “The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. “The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.” - J.G. Ballard

29. “A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.” - Lionel Shriver

30. “Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.” - Charles Spurgeon

31. “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.” - Henry David Thoreau

32. “I believe that secularism is not the enemy of spirituality. Our spirits are in fact secular and free. But the enemy of your spirit is materialism which produces legalism. People scramble for the "perfect law" in order fix everything, while failing to see that law only points towards what is material. And so, people find themselves going around in a circle that will never end. The key is to break away from that circle. You have to begin focusing your attention onto what is inside you and what is inside everybody else. This will in turn produce common sense, intuition, and understanding. Then comes strength.” - C. JoyBell C.

33. “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

34. “Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.” - Alistair Begg

35. “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 Adelai Stevenson

36. “A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.” - Jane Austen

37. “There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities. The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's worldview. This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?” - Jaron Lanier

38. “....I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)” - Plato

39. “The only way of life satisfying the need of all times must be motivated by incentives and rewards – materially, morally and spiritually because motivation for work is produced by incentives and rewards only, an aspect built into the fundamental specification of human nature itself. Any prescription not recognising this important aspect of life is bound to fail in the life-styles of human beings.” - Mohammed Ali Muhiyaddin

40. “The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.” - Daniel Yergin

41. “Bread is a second cause; the LORD Himself is the first source of our sustenance. He can work without the second cause as well as with it; and we must not tie Him down to one mode of operation. Let us not be too eager after the visible, but let us look to the invisible God.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

42. “Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.” - H. Rider Haggard

43. “And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number.” - H. Rider Haggard

44. “This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!” - Charles Dickens

45. “We all need new ideas, images, and experiences far more than we need new stoves or cars or computers.” - Bill Holm

46. “We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.” - John C. Eccles

47. “When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” - H.L. Mencken

48. “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

49. “Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.” - Michael Connelly

50. “Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.” - Iain Pears

51. “You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets.” - Aristophanes

52. “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

53. “It is easier for one to take risks and to chase his dreams with a mindset that he has nothing to lose. In this lies the immense passion, the great advantage of avoiding a materialistic, pleasure-filled way of life.” - Criss Jami

54. “There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.” - Henry David Thoreau

55. “To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.” - Wallace Stegner

56. “Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

57. “I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....” - Thomas Nagel

58. “Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!” - Elisabeth Elliot

59. “The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.” - E.F. Schumacher

60. “The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.” - G.K. Chesterton

61. “Enttäuschung und Frustration werden [...] alle erleben, die sich wie im Märchen danach sehnen, Glück in einem Schlaraffenland zu finden ... Nur, dass unser Schlaraffenland nicht ein großer Berg von süßem Brei ist ... wir haben andere Fantasien und Bilder von Fülle und Erfülltheit in einem imaginären Schlaraffenland, das nur eben unglücklicherweise niemals dort ist, wo wir tatsächlich leben. Vielmehr leben wir mit der Hoffnung auf ein Glück, das uns das Schicksal irgenwann einmal gewähren müsse. [...] So können wir das Schlaraffenland je nach unserer eigenen Fasson ausgestalten - und wir tun es. Privat und auch gesellschaftlich.Doch sobald wir anfangen, uns mit diesem Glücksmodell anzufreunden, und gespannt darauf warten, wie im Lotto das große Los zu ziehen, werden wir auf einem Weg sein, wo das Glück ganz bestimmt nicht zu uns findet! Wir bleiben hungrig und ungesättigt. Denn geheimnisvollerweise ist das Glück dort, wo wir Bezogenheit leben - selbst in dem unspektatulärsten Tun des Alltags.” - Joachim Gauck

62. “To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.” - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

63. “...if I try to make only enough money for my family' immediate needs, it may violate Scripture. ...Even though earning just enough to meet the needs of my family may seem nonmaterialistic, it's actually selfish when I could earn enough to care for others as well.” - Randy Alcorn

64. “We never know how strongly we cling to objects until they are taken away, and he who thinks htat he is attached to nothing, is frequently grandly mistaken, being bound to a thousand things, unknown to himself.” - Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte

65. “If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.” - Kalid Gilad

66. “He is so rich, he has no room to shit.” - Marcus Aurelius

67. “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

68. “The materialist thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.” - G.K. Chesterton

69. “We are born, we suffer, we die. However, love is a possibility for us all and, for some few, there is also a big house."Daniel could not resist asking, because he really wanted to know. "Need they be mutually exclusive? Can't we have both love and house?"Joe smiled. "Certainly. But one must consider carefully how one goes about getting the house.” - Susan Trott

70. “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

71. “The one single use of things which we call our own is that they might be his who hath need of them.” - Thomas Hughes

72. “For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.” - Thomas Hobbes

73. “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

74. “Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

75. “Stuff comes and stuff goes and the only thing that matters in the end is who you are inside, what you do and what make it leaves in the world.” - Claire Cross

76. “We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.” - Alain De Botton

77. “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

78. “Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.” - Alexander Pope

79. “Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.” - Alexandre Dumas

80. “If there is a void in your life then you will never fill it with cash!” - Stephen Richards

81. “Q: What is wrong with the world?A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.” - Kurt Vonnegut

82. “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

83. “Materialism is an identity crisis.” - Bryant McGill

84. “Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.” - Thomas A. Kempis

85. “And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one's habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

86. “On the second and the third night there was again a ball -- this time in mid-ocean, during a furious storm sweeping over the ocean, which roared like a funeral mass and rolled up mountainous seas fringed with mourning silvery foam. The Devil, who from the rocks of Gibraltar, the stony gateway of two worlds, watched the ship vanish into night and storm, could hardly distinguish from behind the snow the innumerable fiery eyes of the ship. The Devil was as huge as a cliff, but the ship was even bigger, a many-storied, many-stacked giant, created by the arrogance of the New Man with his ancient heart.” - Ivan Bunin