Quotes & Sayings About Giving Material Things

Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth ... Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try hard to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us also. To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter it. — John Templeton

And consequently, you have this rich looking film, which gives it this kind of muscular feel, deep focus, soft focus look. I'm not that great on development. I can see where things go wrong, but Beau, Carl and Mike Finch, they worked on it relentlessly. And then I would see the material and I would say, "Well, that just doesn't ring true. I don't quite know why that's happening." — Pierce Brosnan

I think there's a karmic purpose that souls make before they decide to come into people's bodies and become someone's parent, or become someone's child. Maybe my dad disappearing was his way of giving me material with which to work, or a predisposition to feel heightened emotions. — Bat For Lashes

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic. — Adam Gopnik

If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large - more permanent than their material existence - people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need! ... It is the modern Pandora's box, and its plagues are loose upon the world. — Jules Henry

In fact, the most powerful forms of giving are non-material. The gifts of caring, attention, affection, appreciation, and love are some of the most precious gifts you can give, and they don't cost you anything. When — Deepak Chopra

Money has, as we know, no value in itself. It is a convenient yardstick for a large number of material values. But the health and life of an individual as well as the health of a nation cannot be measured by that yardstick. If we, entrusted with protecting and defending the health of the population, give in to a salesman's scale of values we are lost. — Karl Evang

Jesus Christ does not teach us a spirituality 'of closed eyes,' but one of 'alertness,' one which entails an absolute duty to take notice of the needs of others and of situations involving those whom the Gospel tells us are our neighbors ... The gaze of Jesus, what 'his eyes' teach us, leads to human closeness, solidarity, giving time, sharing our gifts and even our material goods. — Pope Benedict XVI

Materialism, which gives priority to material needs and objects, is obviously the opposite of spirituality — Dallin H. Oaks

Carving is a source of joy to the artist ... To attack the raw material, gradually to extract a shape out of it following one's own desire, or, sometimes, the inspiration of the material itself: this gives the sculptor great joy. — Aristide Maillol

What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space ... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space. — Georges Braque

Stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live — Hans Bethe

If you burn yourself out in two years of intense selfless giving, what good is that if you could have given 20 years? Set yourself up well. Get the things you want - God exists in the material and in the spiritual. — Frederick Lenz

If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. — Willa Cather

For many years quantum physics had been giving indications that there are levels of reality other than the material level. — Amit Goswami

Your attitude is everything. Believe in yourself and trust your material. To be a successful writer, write every single day where you feel like it or not. Never, never give up, and the world will reward you beyond your wildest dreams. — Alex Haley

One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable. — Jacob Bronowski

I AM TOLD YOU KNOW EVERYTHING.
The holy man opened the other eye. "The secret of existence is to disdain earthly ties, shun the chimera of material worth, and seek oneness with the Infinite," he said. "And keep your thieving hands off my begging bowl." The sight of the supplicant was giving him trouble.
I'VE SEEN THE INFINITE, said the stranger. IT'S NOTHING SPECIAL.
The holy man glanced around. "Don't be daft," he said. "You can't see the Infinite. 'Cos it's infinite." I HAVE. "All right, what did it look like?" IT'S BLUE. — Terry Pratchett

To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. — George MacDonald

In 'Birth,' I explore the nature of the new world we are approaching with my business-spiritual model, a new model for a new world. This view will enable individuals, companies and even nations to move from collapse to positive change, and bring together the spiritual and the material, giving birth to a new future. — Shari Arison

My father's boots went ahead. His boots were to me as unique and familiar, as much an index to himself, as his face was. When he had taken them off they stood in a corner of the kitchen, giving off a complicated smell of manure, machine oil, caked black mud, and the ripe disintegrating material that lined their soles. They were a part of himself, temporarily discarded, waiting. They had an expression that was dogged and uncompromising, even brutal, and I thought of that as part of my father's look, the counterpart of his face, with its readiness for jokes and courtesies. Nor did that brutality surprise me; my father came back to us always, to my mother and me from places where our judgment could not follow. — Alice Munro

The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.
Trial and error is freedom. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things. — E.F. Schumacher

What is the hope that can give meaning to life? Without some form of hope, the Holy Father argues that life becomes tedious and potentially burdersome, even if it is marked by material influence and technical progress. The person without hope finds himself in an existential difficulty: For what enduring purpose am I clinging to this life that I love and do not want to lose? — Raymond J. De Souza

Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. — Ayn Rand

The Church at its best is about empowering the disempowered and giving voice to the dispossessed and not putting a price on everything and not being about the bottom line and not worshipping the market or everything that is material. — Steve Coogan

Now there is a spiritual selfishness which even poisons the good act of giving to another. Spiritual goods are greater than the material, and it is possible for me to love selfishly in the very act of depriving myself of material things for the benefit of another. If my gift is intended to bind him to me, to put him under an obligation, to exercise a kind of hidden moral tyranny over his soul, then in loving him I am really loving myself. And this is a greater and more insidious selfishness, since it traffics not in flesh and blood but in other persons' souls. Natural asceticism presents — Thomas Merton

Generosity is not limited to the giving of material things. We can be generous with our kindness and receptivity. Generosity can mean the simple giving of a smile or extending ourselves to really listen to a friend. Paradoxically, even being willing to receive the generosity of others can be a form of generosity. — Gil Fronsdal

What seems real to the mind can be as important as any material fact. We live by the spirit and the imagination as well as by our senses. Cartoon animation can give fantasy the same reality as those things we can touch and see and hear. — Walt Disney

...a bad diet will eventually kill our dreams. It's essential that we constantly evaluate the nutritional value of what we are feeding ourselves. It may come down to how many hours of television we're viewing, the quality of the programs we're watching, what music we're listening to, the material we're reading, the conversations we're having, the movies we're seeing, the Web sites we're visiting, the video games we're playing, or the people with whom we're associating. As harmless as these may sometimes seem, excessive consumption of things that induce negative thinking, bad habits, and wrong behavior will thwart our potential.

A good litmus test is to ask yourself if you're giving more airtime to the media, educators, politicians, economists, pop stars, friends, or tradition than you are to God's Word. To see our dreams actualized, God's Word and His will must take precedence over everything else. — Christine Caine

The concept of who your audience is becomes more important than your site. Sometimes you can be commissioned to do a piece in Strasburg, and it works. Sometimes you're commissioned to do a piece somewhere else and it doesn't work, but then it moves to another city, the people embrace it, and becomes part of them. You just misjudged the needs of the people. Art is about giving people material and things to work with to fulfill whatever needs they have. — Lawrence Weiner

I think we're inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn't give us meaning, only material things. — Sam Keen

It is clear that something is seriously lacking in the way we humans are going about things. But what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. By inner values, I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warm-heartedness-or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner value emerge. — Dalai Lama XIV

Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. — Alan Watts

THE GREATEST GIFT One of the greatest gifts we can offer people is to embody nonattachment and nonfear. This is a true teaching, more precious than money or material resources. Many of us are very afraid, and this fear distorts our lives and makes us unhappy. We cling to objects and to people like a drowning person clings to a floating log. Practicing to realize nondiscrimination, to see the interconnectedness and impermanence of all things, and to share this wisdom with others, we are giving the gift of nonfear. Everything is impermanent. This moment passes. That person walks away. Happiness is still possible. — Thich Nhat Hanh

There is no telling what is going to happen in the music business in the next few years, hours, minutes, seconds. Giving artists the chance to produce and distribute their own material is great, very empowering. The technological changes that are happening so rapidly now, amongst all the opinions, are in truth, only two things, inevitable and unstoppable. — Pauley Perrette

Someone who begins to develop an interest in the teachings can tend to distance themselves from the reality of material things, as if the teachings were something completely apart from daily life. Often, at the bottom of all this, there is an attitude of giving up and running away from one's own problems, with the illusion that one will be able to find something that will miraculously help one to transcend all that. But the teachings are based on the principle of our actual human condition. We have a physical body with all its various limits: each day we have to eat, work, rest, and so on. This is our reality, and we can't ignore it. — Namkhai Norbu

But we shouldn't be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with. Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination-in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all! — Peter Wohlleben

Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor. Bread! Bread! I do not believe in a God who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven! — Bill Vaughan

I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself? — Wendell Berry

Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting. — William Goldman

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. — George Eliot

[Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

I feel that I already have the life I love and I don't see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have - bigger advances, more prizes. It's a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt. — Pankaj Mishra

The equality among all members of the League, which is provided in the statutes giving each state only one vote, cannot of course abolish the actual material inequality of the powers concerned. — Hjalmar Branting

Concentrate on material gains. Whatever your opponent gives you take, unless you see a good reason not to. — Bobby Fischer

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine. — Francois Jacob

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols. — Ada Lovelace

Give me great sinners to make great saints! They are glorious raw material for Grace to work upon and when you do get them saved, they will shake the very gates of Hell! — Charles Spurgeon

Not to be attached to something is to be aware of its absolute value. Everything you do should be based on such an awareness, and not on material or self-centered ideas of value. — Shunryu Suzuki

The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage. — August Wilson

Parents do overindulge their children, giving them a profusion of material things ... without the stabilizing effects of earning one's way, of making decisions, of sweating hard to attain some kind of goal, young people are grievously handicapped. — Billy Graham

That's one of the things we're most excited about, really, is just allowing this great, Oscar-nominated actor, giving him material to play in one of his signature roles. — David Kirschner

In daily life, reality gives us material incentives to restrain our irrationality. But what incentive do we have to think rationally about politics? — Bryan Caplan

You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie. — Christopher McQuarrie

You must know everything well before you can know what to discard. You must cover pages with material you will not finally put into the book. That doesn't mean you don't use it. It is still there, must be there, an invisible foundation which gives authority to the story. The planning done on setting is never wasted. Nothing is ever wasted. If it has been thought through and written, it is still there, in every word which does not mention it. — Dorothy Bryant

Nowadays, you really have to make an impression quick and I think this does give people a chance to show off what they've got. It's very difficult these days. You really have to stand out quickly. I think it's also so diverse that there's enough material for everybody. — Julie Halston

I would much prefer to enlarge your life by giving you the gift of my life, rather than gifting your life to material obesity with frivolous trinkets. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

My sincerest gratitude to every ass hole, horrible boss, and worthless piece of shit I've ever met for giving me new and endless material to work with and a way to earn a living exposing you. — Crystal Woods

There are very few comics that understand about exciting the crowd, and that's what I always prided myself on: giving a more confident macho attitude towards delivering material. — Andrew Dice Clay

Instead of trying to understand who we really are, we reach for the "Real Thing". And when the goods we buy fail to match up to those deep desires, instead of giving up on material goods, we just keep banging our heads against the wall and buying more. — James Wallman

Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure. — Gloria Ng

As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones. — Gadadhara Pandit Dasa

Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry. — Hermann Hesse