Possessions Materialism Quotes & Sayings

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly. — Bertrand Russell

We are generally treated based on how much or little we have, earn, or know - or seem to have, earn, or know. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome ... Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving ... The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have - to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return. — Charles Alexander Eastman

Remember, the security and happiness you are seeking is not in your material possessions, your degrees, or relationships. It is much closer than you think. — Mabel Katz

Associated with this inner conflict is a tendency to become hypercritical: unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries. Shut up within themselves, they are necessarily shut off from all others except to criticize them. Since the essence of sin is opposition to God's will, it follows that the sin of one individual is bound to oppose any other individual whose will is in harmony with God's will. This resulting estrangement from one's fellow man is intensified when one begins to live solely for this world, then the possessions of the neighbor are regarded as something unjustly taken from oneself. Once the material becomes the goal of life, a society of conflicts is born. — Fulton J. Sheen

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. — Randy Alcorn

What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — Henry David Thoreau

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them.
...
Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important. — Donna Leon

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house. — William James

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free. — Wallace Stegner

Too many of us die without knowing transcendent joy, in part because we pursue one form or another of materialism. We seek meaning in possessions, in pursuit of cosmic justice for earthly grievances, in the acquisition of power over others. But one day Death reveals that life is wasted in these cold passions, because zealotry of any kind precludes love except of the thing that is idolized. — Dean Koontz

The pearl only weighs the oyster down. — Marty Rubin

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

Nothing in the tangible word that isn't living has any value beyond a dollar amount. Considering that dollars can only buy more tangible and inanimate objects, it would seem a far more worthwhile goal to instead learn to place value on the treasures of the mind. Memories, knowledge and skill together are the only things we will ever actually own. — Ashly Lorenzana

Every year I collect a select amount of material possessions (baseball cards, coins, famous paraphernalia) to pass on to my children. In two or more generations they should have a small fortune of 'ancient' famous items. — Akutra-Ramses Atenosis Cea

He had brought no possessions with him; he would take none away. There were none to have
everything of value was in the school computer or his own head and hands. — Orson Scott Card

Material possessions do not last, but memories last forever. — Margo Vader

In the West many Christians have an abundance of material possessions, yet they live in a backslidden state. — Brother Yun

There is a powerful relationship between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions. — Randy Alcorn

He is so rich, he has no room to shit. — Marcus Aurelius

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

But as an adult working in the fashion industry, I struggle with materialism. And I'm one of the least materialistic people that exist, because material possessions don't mean much to me. They're beautiful, I enjoy them, they can enhance your life to a certain degree, but they're ultimately not important. — Tom Ford

Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes. — Oliver Goldsmith

Life is less a burden without an absolute quest for material possessions — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Virtues are worth more than the material things. — Sunday Adelaja

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928) — Clare Winger Harris

Technologies of easy travel give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere, - in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home? — Nathaniel Hawthorne

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you? — Kazuo Ishiguro

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

To possess possessions, a man will "sell himself" to have what another has, but it never dawns on him ~ that the more he gets, the less he keeps of himself. — Rius

We preoccupy ourselves with what we had - or what we want to have - at the expense of what we have. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions. — Saul D. Alinsky

If there is a void in your life then you will never fill it with cash! — Stephen Richards

I don't like Paradise,
As they probably don't have obsessions there. — Alda Merini

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions ... — Sherwood Anderson

How good something is should never be determined by its cost, designer, origin, or its perceived value by others. — Ashly Lorenzana