Material Quotes & Sayings

A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents' love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness. — Sigmund Freud

We did tons of research. We went to visit a prison. We had speakers. We have read tons of supplementary material, books and articles. We are constantly emailing articles around the writers' room. We have dipped ourselves in prison culture and lore and media, and the experience and the people. We really want to be as informed as possible. — Jenji Kohan

I think meditation became truly a means to a deeper connection as I was searching for a deeper truth within myself. Meditation became almost more spiritual than material in nature over the last two or three years and it has deepened a lot as a result of that. — Karan Bajaj

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. — Langston Hughes

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag. — Michel Faber

The commentaries usually mention nine kinds of internal formations: desire, hatred, pride, ignorance, stubborn views, attachment, doubt, jealousy, and selfishness. Among these, the fundamental internal formation is ignorance, the lack of clear seeing. Ignorance is the raw material out of which the other internal formations are made. Although there are nine internal formations, because "desire" is always listed first, it is often used to represent all the internal formations. — Thich Nhat Hanh

And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways. — Justin Cronin

If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple. — James Joyce

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. — Carl Jung

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem. — Ludwig Von Mises

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society. — Tom Stoppard

Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order. — Bill Mollison

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work. — Chad Harbach

Those who are driven by poverty, those who're free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning. — Kathy Acker

Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers. — P.G. Wodehouse

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Whoever John Stoner is, he is no magician. He could not have made you into a hero if you had not already possessed the raw material. -Concordia Glade to Ambrose Wills. — Amanda Quick

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another. — Winston S. Churchill

At the center of any tree is the great pillar of the central trunk ... It's like building a cathedral by applying paint every week and waiting for it to dry before applying the next paint-thin layer of living material. Each angelic layer is applied, in times of drought and times of moisture alike. The tree simply keeps growing, higher and higher, expanding its territory, pushing out new growth. — Ned Hayes

When a guy gets elected to the Senate or the governor's mansion, he wakes up the next morning and says to himself, 'You're presidential material,' — Geraldine Ferraro

To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had. — Henry David Thoreau

Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you. — Don DeLillo

Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world. — Dorothea Brande

A seed does not contribute much materially to the plant it grows into; the material comes from the soil, sunlight, water, and air. What the seed contributes is information. It has the same DNA as every other living entity, but when its genes begin to be expressed, it pulls from the environment what is needed to make a plant of just a particular kind. — Anonymous

Failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don't let it leave until you pick its pocket. That's a system. — Anonymous

But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. — Virginia Woolf

My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out. — David Henry Hwang

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative. — Jane Campion

I have no shortage of material or offers, it's just a case of what you select to do. But I think it's realistic that my chances of playing Romeo are now over. — Sean Connery

Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen. — Alan Watts

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary. — Henri Bergson

All human beings, by virtue of having been born into this world, are immortal beings - not our material bodies; those are sadly quite fragile, inasmuch as they are bound by the laws of matter and time. The spirit, however, is indestructible. It obeys different laws. — Stephen R. Lawhead

Art is manipulation, the management of material, the directing of fate ... Who does that directing? — Eric Maisel

My whole life is driven by love. It always has been. It's never been driven by material things - which are just benefits of doing something I loved. — Tony Robbins

I cried because there are those of them who are just as intelligent as Ricky Wasserman or Arnie Greenwald or Yael Berg and just because of circumstance, they turn out so horribly. They see the young and affluent, they see their cars and their vacations and their fancy clothes, and they set their hearts on obtaining objects of material wealth. The young and rich already have these things, so they are free to devote their energies to developing their minds or having good, clean fun, or anything they want, really. And they are able to set their goals on spiritual fulfillment because they have everything they need otherwise. It's just not fair. — Phoebe Gloeckner

Evaluate every performance on: stage presence, concentration, delivery, material and lessons learned. — Franklyn Ajaye

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. — Andy Goldsworthy

I grew up playing in youth orchestras, so they were my most treasured memories, so to be in front of an orchestra playing my own material would be incredible. — Laura Mvula

Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. — Hans Hofmann

I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill ... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything. — Val Guest

Death is the destiny of every man. I shall not worry over material wealth. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I lean closer and whisper. I'm already there, so I guess I'll wait for you — Jolene Perry

There is no desire that anyone holds for any other reason than that they believe they will feel better in the achievement of it. Whether it is a material object, a physical state of being, a relationship, a condition, or a circumstance - at the heart of every desire is the desire to feel good. And so, the standard of success in life is not the things or the money - the standard of success is absolutely the amount of joy you feel. — Esther Hicks

When Wu-Wear started making shoes and sneakers and pants, it was shoddy material. — Method Man

I'm more of a creative learner, ... I do very well in projects, but I was not good at memorizing all of that material in the introductory courses. — Robert Sternberg

I love being a dad, it keeps me fit and inspired and children are so funny. They always supply you with acting material! — Wesley Snipes

You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a very large degree what all writers are doing - they're trying to get below the surface. Whether it's in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries. And you have to sort of go where the material is. — David McCullough

When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity. — Daniel Kahneman

If you Need to convince others that you're happy, then you have Not found real Joy.
If you Need to impress others with material objects, then you do Not understand true Wealth.
If you Need to correct others, then you have Not looked in the mirror.
If you Need to put others down, you have Not connected to your Higher Self.
Know Yourself. Be Honest with Yourself. Don't be a teacher or judge, be an ... Example. — Eric Allen

Authors will make far more on those ebooks through direct sales than publishers are offering. There is no incentive for authors to sell those rights to traditional publishers which means, in the fairly short term, publishers run out of material to sell. — Michael A. Stackpole

For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact. — Mike Leigh

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life. — Jen Lancaster

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don't spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. — Malcolm Gladwell

The soy is seeping through the material like a BP oil slick in a Louisiana swamp. — Poppet

It will change everything. We won't need governments and corporations. The very concepts our economic and social systems are based on: money, wealth, privilege, will be meaningless. What use is money when everyone can build everything they need?'...
'These are people who've spent their whole lives fighting their way to the top and you're just going to tell them that there is no top anymore?... it's you that doesn't understand: they only care about material things as status symbols, to show that they're better than everyone else, that they've beaten everyone else, that's what drives them. They'll never give that up. — K. Valisumbra

A warning is in order. Reject any teaching that even suggests material wealth, physical health, or favorable circumstances have anything to do with the amount of faith you have or how pleased God happens to be with you. And beware those who teach that financial donations will unlock an endless abundance of God's blessings. They are false shepherds who will rob you of your money and destroy your relationship with God. The "faith" they proclaim is a toxic faith. — Charles R. Swindoll

As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried
it's much too difficult.'
Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be. — Mem Fox

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right. — David Christian

Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman. — Pablo Picasso

When I was in top 40 bands, I always had to learn new material and new styles. — Kenneth Edmonds

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium. — John Banville

Thoughts and ideas are the source of all wealth, success, material gain, all great discoveries, inventions and achievements — Mark Victor Hansen

What has first drawn him to Max was the man's unyielding character, not whether he was real-life boyfriend material. — K.A. Merikan

When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!' — Alex Gibney

It started off for me as just wanting to be an actor and sort of resenting in a weird way being expected to write as well as be a comedian and an improviser. And then you think about it for a minute, and I smartened up and realized that the only way to sustain a career is to generate your own material. Or to be in control of your career as best you can. And in allowing yourself to do that it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And then you're like "Oh, producing is a thing." — Rob Corddry

The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment. — Sufjan Stevens

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand. — Sybille Bedford

If it's a role like this one, an actual live person, a legend, there's lots of material laid out. — David Strathairn

When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material. — Renee O'Connor

Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead. . . . — Italo Calvino

From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase. — Alex Campbell

Two people can be work at the same job, side by side. One person is working just for a paycheck. Another is working to perfect their being. Some people think that the material world will make them happy. — Frederick Lenz

Dude, we gotta work on your material. Hell, all you need is a little black moustache to twirl and go 'Muahahahaha' while you're at it. — Tessa McFionn

For where did Dante take the material of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

When we focus on winning the battle for material gains,we end up losing spiritual war.If we had a better self of ethics we would be better prepared to deal with the complicated world in which we find ourselves. — David V. Gaggin

After the spiritual powers, there is no thing in the world more unconquerable than the spirit of nationality. The spirit of nationality in Ireland will persist even though the mightiest of material powers be its neighbor. — George William Russell

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself.
The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. — David Foster Wallace

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass. — Steven Johnson

Others of them employ outward marks ... They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted and others formed from different kinds of material. They maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world, such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honoring these images just like the Gentiles. — Irenaeus Of Lyons

All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it. — Marcel Proust

Discipline, for the Christian, begins with the body. We have only one. It is this body that is the primary material given to us for sacrifice. We cannot give our hearts to God and keep our bodies for ourselves. — Elisabeth Elliot

Yet it had been delicious to touch her grandfather's robe. It was as different from ordinary material as something sung from something spoken. In a way she liked her grandfather. Once she had seen children crawling under a circus-tent so that they could see the elephant, and she would have done that to see her grandfather; and what she like in him was the upside-downness of him, as this inverted luxury which gave him an everyday possession
for she supposed this robe was just a dressing gown
which was uniquely exquisite ... — Rebecca West

When student-actors see people and the way they behave when together, see the color of the sky, hear the sounds in the air, feel the ground beneath them and the wind on their faces, they get a wider view of their personal world and development in the theater is quickened. The world provides the material for the theater and artistic growth develops hand-in-hand with one's recognition of it and one's self within it. — Viola Spolin

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out "skilled workers") that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a "value-free" education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative. — James K.A. Smith

Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it;" and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. — James Russell Lowell

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor — Ben Lerner

The children's lessons should provide material for their mental growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure. — Charlotte Mason

The combination of both legs leads to social harmony and material abundance. — Marshall Fritz

I'm living the exact life I planned on living when I was five. My life has taken some turns and changes that I didn't anticipate, and it has brought me different things. I thought material things would bring me happiness, which they didn't. But through this, I have learned what things are important and what aren't. — Tom Ford

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you. — Anais Nin

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

People who know their worth can live austerely; it's the people nagged by the gnawing knowledge of their own cheapness who have that eternal necessity for submerging themselves in what they feel is superlative in material things, as if fine possessions could make them fine. — Mabel Seeley

Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch - or the technology is rejected ... We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature. — John Naisbitt

What is man? ... What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force. — Benjamin Peirce

The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible. — William H. Prescott

I think each album does have a different energy, otherwise you'd be doing the same thing again and not experimenting anew ... Albums are such autobiographical material, not in the material but as an expression of what you're like at the time. — Kate Bush

I was very inspired by Les Blank's film 'Burden of Dreams.' I think what's unique about his film and the two I've made is that they're close examinations of filmmakers and how their own emotional experiences reflect in the material they're rendering, and vice versa - how that material sometimes colors their own lives. — George Hickenlooper

Always demanding the best of oneself, living with honor, devoting one's talents and gifts to the benefits of others - these are the measures of success that endure when material things have passed away. — Henry Ford

The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits - not animals ... . There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. — Ronald Reagan

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi