c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Whenever I fail to complete something immediately I create the same situation in My imagination and complete my task without any mistakes then I celebrate that success with a smile and start it from beginning with a new energy and double efforts
— mohammad rishad sakhi
Faith is a firm hope.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
God sees in you what you can't see in yourself. Remember to keep the faith and never give up!
— Prophetess Dina Rolle
Winning is not about a single game. It's about repeated performance over a long haul. Winners never give up, never accept defeat, and work as long and as hard as it takes to get the job done right. They say, "Don't tell me why I can't do it. Tell me how I can get it done" You have the winner's DNA...take massive action and never give up!
— Farshad Asl
Whenever I fail to complete something immediately I create the same saturation in My imagination and complete my task without any mistakes then I celebrate that success with a smile and start it from beginning with a new energy and double efforts
— mohammad rishad sakhi
If soulmates did exist I am pretty sure they would never divorce you, dump you, kick you out, separate from you or make you an option. They would never give up because you meant that much to them.
— Shannon L. Alder
Toss me like a dough and watch me RISE!
— Chinonye J. Chidolue
I've lost so many battles than I can even remember. What I never knew, though, was that I was actually stronger than I thought I was.
— Ufuoma Apoki
It takes a lot of practices to get it right. The key is to keep practicing.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Any accomplishment is possible with God’s grace.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Never give up.' This is not sound advice, it is bad advice. You must give up when there is no point in continuing. Then begin a new course. There is no greater failure than not changing course when the time is right to do so.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
It's funny how you wanna leave them but still you give yourself every reason not to...
— shivangi lavaniya
Any unexpected change in a steady situation can be described as a problem, a problem to pin you down...While if you think more deep and rational you can easily see it as an opportunity to improve and push you up.
— Rateb Rayyes
Always appreciate what you have and what you are.Don't cry because of a problem, cry for the power to face a challenge...
— Rateb Rayyes
If you look up the definition of greatness in the dictionary and found it saying;"Greatness is something lives within you"Only that moment you are ready to say I AM UNSTOPPABLE
— Rateb Rayyes
Today is a result of yesterday and preparation for tomorrow.All along the road you'll making a lot of decisions and the only thing that matters is not to feel regret.You gotta make it so make it right
— Rateb Rayyes
It is better to experience than to be told.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It's not getting any easier.Life will keep on challenging you as long as you are the strong rival.Once you give up, life will lose interest in you and leave you in peace/ease.
— Rateb Rayyes
He looked at me and said;I see a challenge not a problemI see an opportunity not an obligation I see a must do not a sacrifice....I looked back at him straight in the eye through the mirror and said;You are the new me, the better me...
— Rateb Rayyes
There is hope for the hopeless.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
— Maya Angelou
If we had given up too soon, we would have miss success.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A lot of profanities begin with "F". Word "failure" is one of them.
— Veronica Purcell, In Anwar's Care
I am not ashamed of my failures. It is only a foot-stones for building my success.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If the knock once and door remain lock, do not turn away. With persistent knocks, the door will be open.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If knock the door once and it remains lock, do not turn away. With persistent knocks, the door will be open.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.
— Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale
A child falls many times in attempt to walk.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Don't we have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for awhile.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
If you never stop trying you'll never give up. If you never give up you'll never stop trying.
— Rick W. Terry
Stop now and always wonder. Press forward and tap the wonder.
— Gina Greenlee, Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road
Don’t ignore pain
—  appreciate its message: You need to change now!
No matter how difficult life gets, the important thing is to live it with hope.
— Topanga Boy Meets World
Maybe he thought I would run then. Maybe he thought I would be done. But I had been hurt before. I think he underestimated my ability to pick myself up and keep going. Done? Far from it.
— Glenn Beck, The Snow Angel
Move it or lose it, lose it and you'll learn from it, but never give up.
— Auliq Ice
I got that money on my mind but I ain't blind. I see that if I want it, I have to grind.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett
If you are feeling low, or trampled, unappreciated, or forgotten...and you are reading this, realize it is an illusion...the hope is real...you are valued...and what lies ahead...is brilliance.
— Tom Althouse
How can we tell people "never give up" when some haven't even started yet.
— Onyi Anyado
In the Past, People who had been repeating the same words from back then will make you understand.That's your weakness, causing Severe painful memories you had encountered back in the Past.In the future, say something different YOU haven't said before from the past to the present.That's their weakness, and the Past isn't useless, study it and it will shape your Future.
— Luis Cosajay
Better collapse earlier than giving up later, but what best is never giving up.
— Sakin Maharjan
If you really believe in what you're doing, work hard, take nothing personally and if something blocks one route, find another. Never give up.
— Laurie Notaro
You will never know how much you can accomplish until you try. Never stop trying. Your miracle will come in undefined moments.
— Lailah GiftyAkita
Never give up your wife, husband, children and families.Believe that people can change.Give others opportunity to change.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Never lose hope; until your bones are rotten, never give up. Once the final whistle did not blow up, keep running hard!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream
It is easy to give up in life than to keep trying. Always choose the latter.
— Lailah GiftyAkita
Life is like a videogame, the harder it gets the victory feels better
— Roberto Llamas
Never give up.Never give up on anything.Never stop trying. It better to try and fail than never trying. All the experiences are necessary. It will prepare you for the great success which comes unexpected.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Nothing may stay the same but I guess one good thing that should remain still is the heart that always remembers to: stay strong and stay kind; stay lovely and stay nice; stay good and stay humble; stay true and stay honest. Just stay being the best of your heart could. But when that heart feels like giving up, give it a rest, pause for a while but never ever give up.
— Diana Rose Morcilla
One should embrace the artist's profession only after recognising in oneself an intense passion for Nature and the disposition to pursue it with a perseverance that nothing can shatter - thirst for neither approval nor financial profit. Do not be discouraged by the censure that might fall upon one's works - one must be armoured with a strong conviction which makes one go straight ahead fearing no obstacle. An unremitting task […] an unassailable conscience. (From a sketchbook of 1847).
— Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
You just have to remember that little person inside of you that wanted to take over the world; then, listen to them.
— Chad Hofmann
Never, never give up in life, no matter how tough a situation may seems.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Life is like a videogame. the harder it gets the victory is better
— Roberto Llamas Avalos
I cannot give up chasing after happiness simply because there might be pain down the road.
— Jennifer Beckstrand, Kate's Song
On your track to success, never forget that you are crossing many rivers. Yes you are! And each of those rivers contain crocodiles that may attempt to intimidate you. Never be afraid; sail on and you will get there.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Get up," I tell myself, "You go and make your dreams a reality. There's no use staying home and whine every time life beats you down. There's a meadow in the deep forest; you just have to keep pushing through.
— Millicent Ashby
I will never give up, just push harder because the thought of quitting if far worse than the temporary pain I'm feeling now.
— Sarah van Waterschoot
Never settle for less than what you imagined possible for yourself
— Jerel Hill, Never Give Up on Your Dreams: My Journey of Faith
... Denny was in third place, behind two other cars. They drove past us, and when they came back around for the checkered flag, Denny was by himself; he won the race. When asked how he had overtaken two cars on the final lap, he simply smiled and said that when he saw the starter wag one finger, meaning it was the last lap, he got a flash, and he said to himself, “I will win this race.” One of the racers ahead of him spun off the track, the other locked up his wheels and gave Denny an easy opening to pass. “It’s never too late,” Denny said to Mark. “Things change.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Often things happen to race cars in the heat of the race. A square-toothed gear in a transmission may break, suddenly leaving the driver without all of his gears. Or perhaps a clutch fails. Brakes go soft from overheating. Suspensions break. When faced with one of theseproblems, the poor driver crashes. The average driver gives up. The great drivers drive through the problem. They figure out a way to continue racing. Like in the Luxembourg Grand Prix in 1989, when the Irish racer Kevin Finnerty York finished the race victoriously and later revealed that he had driven the final twenty laps of the race with only two gears! To be able to possess a machine in such a way is the ultimate show of determination and awareness. It makes one realize that the physicality of our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Then what's the point of trying if you can't even win?""You win in lots of different ways," Asher said. "Lots of little wins. The point of this life is not to be good all the time. It's to be as good as you can. No one is perfect. No one does it right all the time. That's not what life is.
— Cate Tiernan, Immortal Beloved
And human will is the strongest force ever created. There are those born to succeed and those who are determined to succeed. The former fall into it, and the latter pursue it all costs. They won't be denied.Nothing daunts them.
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Invincible
Some choose to dream with a safety net. I dream with nothing to catch me, that way if I fall nothing can stop me from rising back up.
— Evelyn Shepherd
Conditioning was something I always shied away from, now I've learnt that training never stops.
— Mark  Donnelly
To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.
— Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
— John Ruskin
They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt
—  they are forbidden to believe.
Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?
— Leonard Ravenhill
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.
— Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s
We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.
— Kahlil Gibran
A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.
— Jane Austen, Emma
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 ‘these are my things, nobody else can touch them.’ 
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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, The Dreaming Sex: Early Tales of Scientific Imagination by Women
Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt
The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.
— Thomas Mann
In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Bread is a second cause; the LORD Himself is the first source of our sustenance. He can work without the second cause as well as with it; and we must not tie Him down to one mode of operation. Let us not be too eager after the visible, but let us look to the invisible God.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
— John Steinbeck
Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.
— Sergio Troncoso, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
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")
— Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix
We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.
— Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness
The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you're glad somebody else is there to hear it.
— Paul David Tripp
If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt
The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.
— Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
We all need new ideas, images, and experiences far more than we need new stoves or cars or computers.
— Bill Holm, The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland
Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tuneWe're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soonCaptains of the old order clinging to the reinsAssuring us these aches inside are only growing painsBut it's a long road out of Eden(...)Behold the bitten apple, the power of the toolsBut all the knowledge in the world is of no use to foolsAnd it's a long road out of Eden
— Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden
On this rock we had built our church. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.
— Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division
For the genuine materialist there is no fundamental, but only a gradual, an “evolutionary” difference, between man and a pest, a noxious insect
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
The wisdom of nature continues to teach humanity that the material...is immaterial.
— Jason Versey
Money is a good weapon against the scum and is of no consequence to the noble mind. - On Money.
— Lamine Pearlheart, To Life from the Shadows: Conversations with the Light
In terms of "quiet" bourgeois democracy two fundamental possibilities are open to the industrial worker: identification with the bourgeoisie, which holds a higher position in the social scale, or identification with his own social class, which produces its own anti-reactionary way of life. To pursue the first possibility means to envy the reactionary man, to imitate him, and, if the opportunity arises, to assimilate his habits of life. To pursue the second of these possibilities means to reject the reactionary man's ideologies and habits of life. Due to the simultaneous influence exercised by both social and class habits, these two possibilities are equally strong. The revolutionary movement also failed to appreciate the importance of the seemingly irrelevant everyday habits, indeed, very often turned them to bad account. The lower middle-class bedroom suite, which the "rabble" buys as soon as he has the means, even if he is otherwise revolutionary minded; the consequent suppression of the wife, even if he is a Communist; the "decent" suit of clothes for Sunday; "proper" dance steps and a thousand other "banalities," have an incomparably greater reactionary influence when repeated day after day than thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever hope to counterbalance. Narrow conservative life exercises a continuous influence, penetrates every facet of everyday life; whereas factory work and revolutionary leaflets have only a brief effect.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
But what is the point of buying vegetables in plastic bags? Everything from the supermarket smells of plastic. Everything from the market smells like it’s supposed to.
— Jinat Rehana Begum, First Fires
If you are dissatisfied with what you have,Then you will never be satisfied with what you have.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Virtues are worth more than the material things.
— Sunday Adelaja
Life is less a burden without an absolute quest for material possessions
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.
— Michael Tanner, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ
I thought suddenly, what is the meaning of all these things? All these bags and bags I've been packing? We could take everything we have with us. We could take every single thing that every single person in the world has ever had. But not of it would mean anything to me. Because no matter how much I took and no no matter how much I had for the rest of my life, I didn't have him anymore. I could have piled everything from here straight to heaven. None of it was him.
— Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans
Sometimes it didn't seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared to other kids my age, and, believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. Sometimes things didn't add up.
— Sharon Leach, Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go: Stories
The materialists, or some of them, would have us believe that the brain produces thoughts as an organ secretes fluids; this is to overlook What constitutes the very essence of thought, namely the materially unexplainable miracle of subjectivity: as if the cause of consciousness - immaterial and non-spatial by definition - could be a material object.
— Frithjof Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition
I think everything in the subjective expression of human experience can be traced back to chemistry, biology, and ones family upbringing. Anything considered transcendental is just a lazy way of saying we don't know why something is the way it is, everything is based in materialism. If you really want to be able to read someone, ask about their upbringing and observe how they have react to interpersonal experience. Then, relate those things back to biology. We are unique, yes, but we are not in control of our uniqueness. We're just meat puppets subjected to the chemical reactions which manifest from the force of the Will.
— Marouane LAASSAFAR
The leaders of thought and of action grope theirway forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly,that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of valueonly as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes fromdevotion to loftier ideals.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings of Theodore Roosevelt: A Reader
In the long run, success or failure will beconditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings of Theodore Roosevelt: A Reader
the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very muchhigher.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings of Theodore Roosevelt: A Reader
But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.
— Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
I Guess there is a Limited Gap in this Republic of Bananas due to the DeKay N Y is Le Vice such an alarming Exchange when you Express your Benetton? Ask Tommy, he’ll figure!
— Natasha Tsakos
Things that are attached to the body do not just add beauty to the body or probably enhance the self confidence of the man within, but they are also the very reasons for pride and excessive self confidence
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Things that are attached to the body do not just add beauty to the body or probably enhances the self confidence of the man within, but they are also the very reasons for pride and excessive self confidence
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Unhappy: People look around and think, why are there so many people that are unhappy? We have progressed so far, yet people are still unhappy. Why isn’t this world the wonderful place it could be? Changing the world doesn’t change us.It does not matter how much we progress materially; it will not change anything. Only learning and seeing the truth will change us, and thus change everything.The truth transforms a mortal man into an immortal spiritual being.It does this because the truth just shows you what you truly are, and that changes everything. The truth does the same thing for the way we see the world and for the same reason. It shows you life clearly; it shows you true life for the first time.
— Michael Smith, The Present
I felt that it was unfair that my lack of a few pounds of flesh should deprive me of a chance at a good job but I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not. To me, my losing was only another manifestation of that queer, material way of American living that computed everything in terms of the concrete: weight, color, race, fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money ... It seemed that I simply could not fit into a materialistic life.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions, but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
We view God as a resource that will broker all my cheap desires.
— Jon Hauser
The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.
— Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
If we would remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodman's axe, we should not be so ready to build our nests in them.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
Forgive me,' Poe repeated earnestly.I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more tha
— Norman Lock, The Port-Wine Stain
Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
The difference between Nazism and Communism is just the size of the leader's moustache.
— Adriano Bulla
Get out of this office! I'll have no feelings here.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
— Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
He fetishized limits.
— Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.
— H.W. Brands
A daily portion is all that a man really wants. We do not need tomorrow's supplies; that day has not yet dawned, and its wants are as yet unborn. The thirst which we may suffer in the month of June does not need to be quenched in February, for we do not feel it yet; if we have enough for each day as the days arrive we shall never know want.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.
— John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation
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, The Easiest Way to Live: Let Go of the Past, Live in the Present and Change Your Life Forever
Imagine you're alive at the end of the Civil War. You're living in the South, but you're a Northerner. You plan to move home as soon as the war's over. While in the South you've accumulated lots of Confederate currency. Now, suppose you know for a fact the North's going to win the war, and the end is imminent. What will you do with your Confederate money? If you're smart, there's only one answer. You should immediately cash in your Confederate currency for U. S. currency - the only money that will have value once the war's over. Keep only enough Confederate currency to meet your short-term needs. Kingdom currency, backed by the eternal treasury, is the only medium of exchange recognized by the Son of God, whose government will last forever. The currency of his kingdom is our present faithful service and sacrificial use of our resources for him. The payoff in eternity will be what Paul called 'a firm foundation' consisting of treasures beyond our wildest dreams.
— Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions and Eternity
Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.
— H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900
Security is by far the city's predominant business.
— Ron Suskind, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.
— Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.
— George F. Will, The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
He wants you for parts.
— Star Wars: The Force Awakens
On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence.
— Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction
Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.
— E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.
— George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone.
— Aryn Kyle, The God of Animals
Materialistic perception of life makes us spiritually shortsighted
— Sunday Adelaja
We are not less because we have less
— a Mayan Priest
Science and religion have in common the aim of seeking and achieving unity. Most scientists today are being led increasingly away from the fundamental aim of science to achieve unity into rather limited ways of thinking without much open-mindedness, doing things merely to meet limited material needs.
— Maurice Wilkins
The conflict between science and religion has a single and simple cause. It is the designation as religiously canonical of any conception of the material world open to scientific investigation....As a matter of fact, most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts of the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man. The result has been constant turmoil for many centuries, and the turmoil will continue as long as religious canons prejudge scientific questions.
— George Gaylord Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist
One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.
— David Halberstam, The Powers That Be
The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.
— Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business, and too much of a business to be called a sport.
— Philip Wrigley
Other major world religions are still centered in the same general geographic area from which they originated except for Christianity. Even more intriguing, the center of Christian growth continues to move. Why? This author suggests that Christian principles bring prosperity but then the prosperity brings a temptation to chase stability and respectability. Thus, Christian growth moves to an area where people are desperate enough to trust Christ alone.
— Andrew Walls
Materialism wars against our souls in a twofold manner. First, it makes us discontent and envious of others. Second, it leads us to pamper and indulge our bodies so that we become soft and lazy. As we become soft and lazy in our bodies, we tend to become soft and lazy spiritually. When Paul talked about making his body his slave, so that after having preached to others he himself would not be disqualified, he was not thinking about physical disqualification, but spiritual. He knew well that physical softness inevitably leads to spiritual softness. When the body is pampered and indulged, the instincts and passions of the body tend to get the upper hand and dominate our thoughts and actions. We tend to do not what we should do, but what we want to do, as we follow the cravings of our sinful nature.
— Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness
We have enough money. You don't want to be Uncle Daddy.
— Jennifer Crystal
We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.
— Erwin Schrödinger, 'Nature and the Greeks' and 'Science and Humanism'
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
— George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
Whether you buy a new TV, or car, (etc.) or any other “material” thing is often “immaterial” to God.
— Donald L. Hicks, Look into the stillness
Justice is useful when money is useless.
— Plato, The Republic
God is not against you owning things, but he is against the things owning you.
— Orrin Woodward
Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep's clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute
Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshipping.
— Thomas Hughes
This work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.
— Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford
Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations
— Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford
Countries which have a different base, for example, a Christian one (or at least one with the memory of a Christian foundation) may indeed act most inconsistently and horribly. But when a state with a materialistic base acts arbitrarily and gives no dignity to man, internally or externally, it is being consistent to its basic presuppositions and principles.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
I will say that the cross of materialism is that it never quite succeeds in believing what it preaches, in thinking its own thought. This may sound complicated, but is in fact simple: the materialist says, for example, that we are not free, though he is convinced, of course, that he asserts this freely, that no one is forcing him to state this view of the matter — neither parents, not social milieu, nor biological inheritance. He says that we are wholly determined by our history, but he never stops urging us to free ourselves, to change our destiny, to revolt where possible! He says that we must love the world as it is, turning our backs on past and future so as to live in the present, but he never stops trying, like you or me, when the present weighs upon us, to change it in hope of a better world. In brief, the materialist sets forth philosophical these that are profound, but always for you and me, never for himself. Always, he reintroduces transcendence — liberty, a vision for society, the ideal — because in truth he cannot not believe himself to be free, and therefore answerable to values higher than nature and history.
— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living
The more things we accumulate, the more cluttered our lives become, and the more stressed we feel as we are compelled to think about them. Life is about people not about things.
— Natalie Vellacott
Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon
—  to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.
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 cosmology.
— Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
...to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.
— Paulo Freire
On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.
— Robert Walser, Selected Stories
Someday you will die. Because you are embodied through and through, at that point you will cease to exist. You will not meet death, because, as the sage says, "Where death is I am not; where I am death is not, so we never meet." When you die there will no longer be any self that is you. Use your self while you have it.
— Owen J. Flanagan, The Problem Of The Soul Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them
The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.
— Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
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 without again.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The most animated talks we have are about…things
— Andre Agassi, Open
When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the product, and a means of announcing your own identity.
— Gregory C. Carlson, Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says about You
Makers?" said Toby. Jaysir nodded."We're not loners, you know. There just weren't any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity.
— Karl Schroeder, Lockstep
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, Quietly in Their Sleep
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, Winesburg, Ohio
We have too quickly bought into the lie that we’ll be happier with more—and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less.
— Joshua Becker, Clutterfree with Kids
The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing.
— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living
James Bond: a paid assassin of plutocratic cartels, a womanizer, a dipsomaniac, a speed demon, a materialist.
— O Anna Niemus
In a hyper materialist environment where everything is reduced to mere economic considerations, what we deem to be important is often trivial, a temporary fix for deeper and more profound yearnings.This has given rise to what some may describe as a unique pathology common to modern wealthy societies: moral and spiritual emptiness among opulence and material luxury.
— Cory Bernardi, The Conservative Revolution
In the West many Christians have an abundance of material possessions, yet they live in a backslidden state.
— Brother Yun