Material Realm Quotes & Sayings

Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. — Alan Moore

In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm. — Margaret Wertheim

To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world. — Richard M. Weaver

Is the proposed operation likely to succeed? What might the consequences of failure? Is it in the realm of practicability in terms of material and supplies? — Chester W. Nimitz

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us - albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human's efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Thoughts and ideas are not phantoms. They are real things. Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things. — Ludwig Von Mises

What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction. — Aaron Siskind

Most of my recorded material has been in small group configurations. I have not released large orchestral works as recordings because it hasn't been within the realm of possibility. — Bill Dixon

[A] private property regime makes people responsible for their own actions in the realm of material goods. Such a system therefore ensures that people experience the consequences of their own acts. Property sets up fences, but it also surrounds us with mirrors, reflecting back upon us the consequences of our own behavior. — Tom Bethell

Man is a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice, and cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things. A noble and Godlike character is not a thing of favour or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with Godlike thoughts. An ignoble and bestial character, by the same process, is the result of the continued harbouring of grovelling thoughts. — James Allen

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it. — Antonin Artaud

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. — Marcel Proust

Whatever it is you want in this life, be it material things, a place you want to be, or an experience you want to have, you must first make it real in the realm of your consciousness. — Brandi L. Bates

If it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. -Stephen C Meyer, PHD — Lee Strobel

To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect. — Dion Fortune

When we use our intelligence to comprehend and implement Gita wisdom, then it forms a bridge that takes us from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the spiritual, from the mundane to the divine. In that invisible, non-material, divine realm, our potential for personality and relationships blossoms fully in our loving connection with Krishna. — Chaitanya Charan Das

What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to abolish the barriers of scarcity and material necessity beyond which, Marx held, the true realm of individual freedom could begin. — David Harvey

Reductionism argues that we can learn what 'makes things tick' by looking more closely at matter, examining the underlying units. There are at least two problems with this approach. First, reductionism assumes that only observable, material items are 'real,' even though the vacuum of space is known to contain vast amount of inaccessible, 'invisible' energy. Subatomic particles go in and out of observable 'existence,' and science does not know 'where' they go when they are not manifesting here. Second, this path of reasoning ignores a major quandary encountered in the realm of quantum physics. When examining matter more closely
diving down from the molecular level to the subatomic
a point is soon reached where there is virtually nothing present, at least not an obvious 'material something. — Mark Ireland

Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in the material realm. — Paramahansa Yogananda

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation. — Patti Smith

Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits ... One should ... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh. — David Bentley Hart

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die. — Marcel Proust

Descartes's declaration that reality divides neatly into two realms reassured the Church that the province of science would never overlap, and therefore never challenge , the world of theology and the spiritual. Science ceded the soul and the conscious mind to religion and kept the material world for itself. In return for this neat dividing up of turf, Descartes hoped, religious leaders would lay off scientists who were studying natural laws operating in the physical, nonmental realm. The ploy was only partly successful for Church science relations. Descartes himself was forced to flee Paris for Holland in search of greater tolerance. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Now here is a key: you want to make it real and present in the realm of your consciousness. You don't say "I'm going to do such and such" - it already has happened. Now, is consciousness real? It exists and it is very powerful. The idea is to have this mesh between your consciousness - your visualization - and the so-called material world. — George Leonard

Judaism minimizes the distinction between body and soul. ... Judaism rejects that duality. First, it does not see death as liberation from earthly bondage and a graduation to a better world. It sees death as a tragedy. Death puts an end to a person's ability to sanctify the world. The death of a good person diminishes God's presence on earth. Second, Judaism does not see the material world, the world of food and sex and sleep and other bodily needs, as being less worthy than the realm of the spirit. Nothing created by God is vile or useless. Everything can be made holy or made base by the way in which it is used. The Talmud tells of one of the sages seeing workers cleaning and decorating a statue of the emperor and musing, "If that statue, which is an image of a flesh-and-blood king, is worthy of being cared for so carefully, how much more so my body, which is an image of the King of Kinds. — Harold S. Kushner

Cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and
material things. Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of
circumstance. — James Allen

When I speak elsewhere in the book of the multifaceted joys of the resurrected life in the new universe, some readers may think, But our eyes should be on the giver, not the gift; we must focus on God, not on Heaven. This approach sounds spiritual, but it erroneously divorces our experience of God from life, relationships, and the world - all of which God graciously gives us. It sees the material realm and other people as God's competitors rather than as instruments that communicate his love and character. It fails to recognize that because God is the ultimate source of joy, and all secondary joys emanate from him, to love secondary joys on Earth can be - and in Heaven always will be - to love God, their source. — Randy Alcorn

Man's needs are infinite, and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material. — E.F. Schumacher

Man's unconscious believes that it must use deception and self-deception to allow the conscious mind to survive and justify itself within our material realm. To do this it must eliminate vast amounts of information form man's conscious mind. Deception and self-deception are the methods it uses to eliminate this information. — D.R. Cozen

If there is a single fundamental underpinning in the intellectual tradition of Western scientific thought, it is arguably that there exists an unbridgeable divide between the world of mind and the world of matter, between the realm of the material (which is definitely real) and the realm of the immaterial (which, according to the conventions of science, is likely illusory). — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. — Rudolf Rocker

We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane; the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen. — Oswald Chambers

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting. — Bill Bryson

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists. — Mary Oliver

Kuan Yin Speaks on The Law of the Spiritualization (Transformation) of Matter: "The earth is trying to teach humans that everything is spirit ... Being human is an opportunity to bring spirit into all that is material ... The quality and intensity of resonance emanated from a given point is thus attracted back. When one brings spirit into the human realm, it can spiritualize matter. Matter can then become lighter, (indeed liberated), not as dense as before."-Kuan Yin — Hope Bradford

I wanted nirvana," I explained. "I wanted death. I wanted release, any sort of release. And yet here I am, stuck in the material realm; neither enlightened, nor dead, nor free. And that hurts. It hurts so much." It — Joss Sheldon

Goal setting is another integral part of achieving any dream. It is what takes a supernatural vision into the material realm where we can see it being accomplished. — Phil Pringle

Whatever you proclaim as your identity here in the material realm is also your drag. You are not your religion. You are not your skin color. You are not your gender, your politics, your career, or your marital status. You are none of the superficial things that this world deems important. The real you is the energy force that created the entire universe! — RuPaul

In striving for the best, in losing onself in others, one is lifted above the common material furniture of life, above the gaudy trappings and encumbering paraphenalia ... into the realm of peace which passeth understanding. — Olympia Brown

The resurrection of the body forbids us to despise the material realm. — Rousas John Rushdoony