materialism

A man may follow vanity as truly in the counting-house as in the theatre. If he be spending his life in amassing wealth, he passes his days in a vain show.

I struggled with insecurity because I was trying to find my security in things. But when I began serving God with all my heart, my security was in Him.

The conviction that's underneath a lot of other statements is, "I don't trust Gjod.

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.

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.

I've never found time to indulge more than a single ambition.

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

A materialistic world will not be won to Christ by a materialistic church.

A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.

There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

That__ what money will buy you, in America,_ Brown had said, firmly. __eople say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?_ __hy?_ asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown__ part. __ecause they have better stuff,_ Brown had replied. __o other reason.

America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we__e been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don__ want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs.

I wanted to be a sadhu. But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A real test of faith would be to go back to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping countries on earth [America] and be a sadhu there.

I do not think anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and [Anthony] Collins without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful Power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered orthodoxy.