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...

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but...

It was a night of early spring,The winter-sleep was scarcely broken;Around us shadows and the windListened for what was never spoken.Though half a score of years are gone,Spring comes as sharply now as then—But if...

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior...

I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning.

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

On the second and the third night there was again a ball — this time in mid-ocean, during a furious storm sweeping over the ocean, which roared like a funeral mass and rolled up mountainous...

Miller believes, like many theists, that religion brings us beyond the bounds of materialism. (Ironically he insists on a material explanation [evolution] for our existence.) However, he fails to explain how religion does this. Will...

Bei vielen Menschen […] vermute ich eine geheime Verfassung, deren virtueller Artikel 1 lautet: “Die Besitzstandswahrung ist unantastbar.

Fighting physically signifies spiritual weakness.

When we see a good-looking woman with a not-so-good-looking man, we assume that the man must have a good bank balance. When we see a good-looking man with a not-so-good-looking woman, we assume that she...

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain,...

One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a...

There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone … Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood … You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is...

The job wouldn’t be just put the summer, but for a long time, as long as she could see ahead. Once they were used to the money coming in it would be impossible to do...

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of...

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.

There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair.

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?

[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our...

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference...

There’s a correlation between the number of digits on a man’s bank balance, and, the number of things that his woman is willing to forgive him for.

The Christmas tree, twinkling with lights, had a mountain of gifts piled up beneath it, like offerings to the great god of excess.

It’s not enough, and so limiting, to teach the simplistic value of a designer’s material wear. Give children the gift of values that will last far beyond [a] fad’s temporal popularity.

The one single use of things which we call our own is that they might be his who hath need of them.