Nonmaterial Quotes & Sayings

People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment. — Donella H. Meadows

The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.' — Edmund Phelps

I find the violence in PG13 movies unbearable. This kid will never run home, never have another birthday. His death is slow, nightmarish. And you have to explore the consequences - the people who live on with this death. — Marlon James

Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital? — Timothy Leary

The man who remains a fool even in advanced age is really a fool, just as the Indra-Varuna fruit does not become sweet no matter how ripe it might become. — Chanakya

Further, in the modern story, reality is that which is observable, measurable, and repeatable - the kinds of phenomena available, accessible, and verifiable to the five senses. Thus, reality comes to equal the scientific method. It should come as no surprise that in such a world the life of the spirit is ignored or marginalized (as well as a great many other nonmaterial things.) This view of life subsequently birthed in human beings a ravenous materialism as matters of the soul were ignored or reinterpreted within this tightly controlled version of reality. When the life of the spirit is ignored, people will seek to feed the hunger of a neglected soul with the only nourishment available: in our context, the consumptive acquisition of material goods. — Tim Keel

Human minds are not equipped to face the realities of nonmaterial existence on this sphere. It is too much for any mortal to bear for long." Again — Terry Brooks

Bill Clinton says the middle-class folks in Topeka who contribute to The 700 Club or Focus on the Family are radicals whose beliefs pose a mortal danger to this nation! — Don Feder

We, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire. — William Carlos Williams

They had taken see-no-evil and had made it their own by adopting a state sanctioned Orwellian see-no-evil policy — Jonathan Dunne

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon. — Louis Kronenberger

Death may simply be an alteration in consciousness, a transition for continued life in a nonmaterial form. — Edgar Mitchell

If the life-supporting ecosystems of the planet are to survive for future generations, the consumer society will have to dramatically curtail its use of resources - partly by shifting to high-quality, low-input durable goods and partly by seeking fulfillment through leisure, human relationships, and other nonmaterial avenues. We in the consumer society will have to live a technologically sophisticated version of the life-style currently practiced lower on the economic ladder. — Alan Thein Durning

Very much like the fiduciary value of money, mind is an abstraction riding a physical vehicle. Like monetary fiduciarity, the idea of mind as a separate, nonmaterial essence of being developed over thousands of years, leading to the modern concept of an immaterial consciousness, a disembodied spirit. Tellingly, in both secular and religious thought, this abstraction has become more important than the physical vehicle, just as the "value" of a thing is more important than its physical attributes. — Anonymous

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. — Milan Kundera

I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries. — Peter Ackroyd