Billions of years before twelve step groups, God committed shotgun suicide. Today wall scrapings share His gratitude stories.

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

I have nothing to lose. I keep all my valuables in a safe.

When everything gets too much, give some away

We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the...

Manlius … took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world,...

Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.

And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one...

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material...

Real love, real friends, real body parts…

God is not against you owning things, but he is against the things owning you.

To buy women things, some men entertain. To entertain women, some men buy things.

I am learning that man can live profoundly without masses of things.

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....

Why ask for your daily bread when you own the bakery?

Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.(“The Wendigo”)

Some people, when there’s a threat of everything they have being ripped away at a moments notice, they place value on the things they can keep with them, or find anywhere, so they can say...

He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to...

The connection between spirit and other matter, or between the visible and invisible world of human beings, is at present little understood. I am of the opinion that the connection is far more intimate than...

[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.

Enttäuschung und Frustration werden […] alle erleben, die sich wie im Märchen danach sehnen, Glück in einem Schlaraffenland zu finden … Nur, dass unser Schlaraffenland nicht ein großer Berg von süßem Brei ist … wir...

It is good to stay in a peaceful poverty than to stay in a painful wealth.

There’s a saying that you can’t put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it’s so much lower than you would think. Yes, human...

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative...

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort — sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine. This state of affairs, which arose out of a struggle against poverty, overshoots...

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...

Those who think of their house as only a ‘machine to live in’ should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a...

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money...

A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”(Analects 4.9)

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...

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...

The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus...

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to...

Most employees don’t really want to be highly-paid; they just want to earn more than their peers, and, more importantly, more than their neighbours.

The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.

I’ve often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His...

Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.

Materialism is an identity crisis.

Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally...

Carlyle’s genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region...

The double consequence of artifice–to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact–is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which...

Letting go of “stuff” allowed the world to collapse behind me as I moved, so I became nothing more or less than who I simply was: Me.

There is no ownership. There is only stewardship.

You can never have too much money.

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.

When a man’s girlfriend’s parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they’re not really concerned about him; they’re concerned about their daughter’s tummy.

Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side—in wave-like motions following each other. …At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this...