Materialism Versus Spiritualism Quotes

The left-hand path adept seeks to liberate him/herself from passive subjection to the illusory nature of Maya, thus freeing the consciousness from the binds of self-created delusion. ~ Zeena Schreck

To the non-initiate, whose experience of sexuality and bodily pleasure may be distorted by negative cultural conditioning, the introduction of sexuality into a sacred context is often mistakenly misconstrued as the ordinary pursuit of sex for recreation. ~ Zeena Schreck

Ever since he'd given up money, certain people had called him a freeloader, a parasite. (As one comment-thread malapropist put it: "Do you Believe you are smooching off others?") They demanded to know what he was giving back. To which Suelo asked, Who says you need to give something back? What does a raven give? What does a barnacle give, or a coyote? In his view, every living thing gave plenty, merely by existing. But from a strictly materialistic view, his critics had an excellent point. A raven contributes nothing, except of course his own corpse, which will feed some other being. Now Suelo was dying, and he offered his body to the ravens, the coyotes, the ringtails, the mice, the ants. ~ Mark Sundeen

Consciousness is endless, from one incarnation to the next. It simply will and does manifest in other places and times, regardless of what becomes of the human race. ~ Zeena Schreck

The Gnostic's passionate adoration of Sophia was known as philosophia – the love of Sophia – a mystical communication with divine feminine wisdom, having little to do with the strictly intellectual, most often masculine, pursuit currently labeled "philosophy. ~ Zeena Schreck

Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given. ~ Zeena Schreck

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

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities. ~ William James

You can never have too much money. ~ Jess C. Scott

… an Emperor says, "I will kill you if you do not come", and the man bursts into a laugh and says, "You never told such a falsehood in your life, as you tell just now. Who can kill me? Me you kill, Emperor of the material world! Never! For I am Spirit unborn and undecaying; never was I born and never do I die; I am the Infinite, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient; and you kill me, child that you are!" That is strength, that is strength! ~ Swami Vivekananda

As you get older, you'll realise that a £250 watch and a £25 watch both tell the same time.

A Michael Kors wallet and a Primark wallet hold the same amount of money.

A £500,000 and a £100,000 house host the same loneliness.

True happiness is not found in materialistic things. ~ Fuad Alakbarov

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

A fast car can make women 'like' a man; and a man 'like' women ... fast. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Saint Paul lives in the Christian imagination as the chief sponsor of Christian contempt for Jews, the avatar of law versus grace, flesh versus spirit, works versus faith, Moses versus Jesus, the Old Covenant versus the New. This brutal dichotomizing was attributed to Paul most influentially by Martin Luther, who used a perceived Jewish legalism, materialism, and obsession with externals as stand-ins for the decadence of his nemesis, the pope. "Because the Papists, like the Jews," he wrote, "insist that anyone wishing to be saved must observe their ceremonies, they will perish like the Jews."39 After Luther, both Protestants and Catholics read Paul as the preeminent tribune of Jewish corruption - a misreading that had terrible consequences, especially in Luther's Germany, where the Volk were defined in ontological opposition to Juden. Paul's ~ James Carroll

I wonder how long this word will last, governed exclusively by the merciless, inhuman and immoral criteria of global economy. Seeing the shadow of distant islands, I imagined one still inhabited by a tribe of poets set aside for when, after the middle age of materialism, humanity will have to start to put other values into his existence. ~ Tiziano Terzani

It's easy to be overwhelmed by our desires for material things, but the fact is, most of us know what we truly value. Sometimes we just need a little reminder. ~ Willie Nelson

I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake. ~ Augustus De Morgan

As John Howard Yoder has said, If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real. ~ Scot McKnight

Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened - yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments - particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world - and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments. ~ James Randi

If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe? ~ Paul Henri Thiry

Some atheists are quite explicit that their atheism comes first. One of the most famous is Richard Lewontin, a professor of genetics, who said it wasn't science that compelled him to accept a materialistic explanation of the universe. It was an a priori materialism. ~ John Lennox

When everything gets too much, give some away ~ Benny Bellamacina

The Truth Is That I Was Recognized For Stubbornness And Not Goodness. Even, Though I Was Very Intelligent And Sent To School By A Little Few Supports From Sponsors And My Mother. My Brain Was Never Ever Cool. Due To All The Mistakes I Saw From A Very Tender Age From All Those Whom I Looked Upon As Elders And Shinning Examples. Although They Where Some Good Examples Which Still Live On. Still The Early Damaged As Already Been Done. So It Led Me Dropping Out Of School In To Working And Using The Great Ancient Vedic Philosophies I Have Been Hearing From The Very Beginning Of My Conception In My Mother Womb Till The Day I Was Born And Forever. I Used Them All To Materialize Many Of My Dreams And Practice Mysticism Coupled With Spiritualism To Keep My Self Secured And Keep Cool Depending On God. ~ Baba Tunde Ojo-Olubiyo

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

*I'm hustling* is a low self-esteem having man's way of saying *I'm unemployed,* when answering a seemingly materialistic woman's question as to what he does for a living. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

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

He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn't inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that "spirit," however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences - which, though he might suppress them, he couldn't altogether erase from memory. ~ Sol Luckman

This was a time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up fire and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a disembodied idea, and the problems of alimentation and fuel supply took the place of food and firewood. ~ Boris Pasternak

I'd much rather buy an experience than something I can possess in the material world ~ Ashly Lorenzana

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

There is no room for God's Word in our culture, where our children are without reverence for God or faith in the Bible. There is no room for our Lord's creed of purity and self-denial when the media sends forth a constant barrage of profanity and indecency and materialism. ~ Billy Graham

In pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learned to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, may be anything else, but they are certainly not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to exclude all properties of the objects considered other than their number-and this ability is the product of a long historical evolution based on experience. Like the idea of number, so the idea of form is derived exclusively from the external world, and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought. ~ Friedrich Engels

Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations ~ Thomas Hughes

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them. ~ Megan Chance

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism. ~ Leonard Susskind

Writing, therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? How much easier is it to surrended to materialism or cynicism or to a hundred other ways of life that are, in fact, ways to hide from life and from our fears. When we write, we resist the facile seduction of theses simpler roads. We insist on finding out and declaring the truths that we find, and we dare to out those truths on the page. ~ Jack Heffron

Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed. ~ Sean Carroll

If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this ... We call our strategy the wedge . ~ Phillip E. Johnson

It seems mutants have something in their lives called gravy. They know truth, but it is buried under thickening and spices of convenience, materialism, insecurity, and fear. They also have something called frosting. It seems to represent how they spend almost all the seconds of their existence in doing superficial, artificial, temporary, pleasant-tasting, nice appearing projects and spend very few actual seconds of their lives developing their eternal beingness. ~ Marlo Morgan

It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand.4 ~ John C. Lennox

I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self- important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life and death decisions and struggles... surely a kind of transcendence would be found there? ~ Paul Kalanithi

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical. ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould

There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e. in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in our study of the material universe - before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification. ~ Roy A. Crowson

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. ~ Greg Carlson

The material world claims, 'I am what I think', whereas spiritualism says, 'I am, therefore I think'. ~ Gian Kumar

Materialism - an attachment to physical goods beyond their practical value - was a trap; a chain to ensnare the foolish with their own greed. ~ Drew Karpyshyn

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

I am not talking about what every one of us means by love. Little namby-pamby love is lovely. Man rails in love with woman, and woman goes to die for man. The chances are that in five minutes John kicks Jane, and Jane kicks John. This is a materialism and no love at all. If John could really love Jane, he would be perfect that moment. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. ~ Marsilio Ficino

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

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

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen - that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word 'persecution'…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof - then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Why should the simple fact of your having more money entitle you to a greater share of the Earth's limited natural resources? ~ Shekhar Kapur

In a materialistic society, there's no such a thing as a 'romantic' broke man. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana