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Consumption Quotes

Browse 667 quotes about Consumption.

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Consumption Quotes

“And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.”

DesireCategoriesConsumptionSimilaritySpecializationProduction
Book:Underworld
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“Living as a slave to unchecked personal desire and subjugated to external circumstances is wearisome. It is a common error to devote a person’s life to earning money. While money relives us from the stress of suffering from deprivation, moneymaking will not make us happy. A person must have passion in life in order to achieve any degree of personal bliss.”

DesireCapitalismCapitalistConsumptionConsumerismConsumer CultureMoneymakingConsumerist
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.”

DesirePassionGreedHungerSatisfactionIntimacyConsumptionUnsatiable
Book:The Sport of Kings
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“Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered : humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. (“Buying now, dying later”)”

PowerDyingDiscoveryAddictionBoredomBuyingRemedyConsumptionStanding OutMindfulMedicationOthersSupremacyExtravaganceHumblenessCrowdCureExpenditureConveyFictitiousAdminister
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“But as in the degrees of sickness thou art to submit to God, so in the kind of it (supposing equal degrees) thou art to be altogether indifferent whether God call thee by a consumption or an asthma, by a dropsy or palsy, by a fever in thy humours, or a fever in your spirits; because all such nicety of choice is nothing but a colour to a legitimate impatience, and to make an excuse to murmur privately, and for circumstances, when in the sum of affairs we durst not own impatience.” Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Dying”, extract from chapter IV.I (The Practice of Patience) para 5.”

DeathSpiritDyingSickAffairChoiceConsumptionImpatientFeverAsthmaDropsyPalsy
Author:Jeremey Taylor
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“I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me ever more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism had greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity—thus capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism.”

WealthCapitalismGreedProfitCommunismMaterialismConsumptionIncome InequalityKarl MarxWealth Distribution
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

WorkDisciplineCivilizationConsumptionBarbariansBarbarism
Author:Hilaire Belloc
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“There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.”

TodayWorkFutureConsumptionModern Life
Book:Girlfriend in a Coma
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“The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it. He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.”

HumanityAnimalPowerHumanAnimalsConsumptionEcologyKinshipResource
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“I should like, I think, to die of consumption; it is so romantic; and the symptoms are so agreeable! What a pity it is that it is so slow in its approaches, that we must be so long about dying of it; and then, too, there is so much coughing and groaning, so little dignity in the thing,--in short, I never could perceive any thing to admire in consumption but its name and the name is its best part.”

RomanceLonelinessIllnessFrustrationConsumptionRomanticization
Author:Lord Byron
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“We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only -- 'to learn' becomes 'to accumulate credits'.”

LanguageEducationLearningSatisfactionConsumptionEducational Philosophy
Book:The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
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“We live in a world where it is completely the norm to worry about what we put in our bodies but worry very little about what we throw in our minds. We think a hamburger is bad but a celebrity gossip magazine is completely harmless. As children you never hear “don’t put that garbage in your mind,” but for our body counterpart it is common thread. There is something very wrong with this scenario.”

MindBodyHappinessSpiritSpiritualityFoodHealthMindfulnessEatingConsumptionDiet
Book:Solitude: How Doing Nothing Can Change the World
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“Los habitantes de países más o menos ricos comemos al revés de como comió la enorme mayoría de la humanidad desde el principio de los tiempos. Es un cambio cultural radical, y no parece que lo notemos demasiado. Los hombres siempre comieron sobre todo hidratos de carbono y fibras vegetales; a veces, cada tanto, los acompañaban con un trocito de proteínas animales. Cada vez que comemos un bife con ensalada, una pata de pollo con arroz, una hamburguesa con puré, un choripán, estamos dando vuelta esa costumbre milenaria: poniendo el trozo de animal como centro al que acompañan esos hidratos o fibras vegetales. Creo que no nos damos cuenta de la pompa que eso significa. Creo que cualquier indio, cualquier africano, muchos sudacas lo notarían enseguida. Porque, para la mayoría de los habitantes del OtroMundo, el sistema sigue siendo el mismo: el consumo mundial de alimentos parece muy variado, pero tres cuartos de la comida consumida en el planeta es arroz, trigo o maíz; solo el arroz es la mitad de la comida mundial. Digo: la mitad de toda la comida que los 7.000 millones de humanos comemos cada día es arroz. (…) Comer carne es un alarde bestial de poder. La carne es la metáfora más perfecta de la desigualdad.”

PoliticsFoodHungerConsumption
Book:El hambre
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“Bling" is not an indication of riches. It is a product of value-based spending, to enrich the pockets of those outside of ones sphere of influence...the haves' bleeding the have-nots'.”

QuotesInfluenceValueSpendingRichesShoppingConsumptionRetailBlingHave NotsHaves
Book:From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence
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“In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light. First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.”

ReadingBooksConsumption
Book:House of Leaves
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“The last trawlers will deliver their load to those with the highest purchasing power. As the gap between high and low-income people is opening further, society's ability to react is further undermined. The reason is that influential decision-makers (who are typically in the high-income segment) are removed from the realities of overshoot. This means that our system loses necessary feedback. If those who steer society are ever more shielded from physical reality, course corrections become unlikely. Overall, the experience of many influential city dwellers is still one of expansion.”

EnvironmentInequalityConsumptionConsumerismEcological Footpint
Book:Ecological Footprint: Managing Our Biocapacity Budget
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“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.”

PsychologyCapitalismSocial JusticeInequalityColonialismConsumptionRich And PoorTourism
Book:Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
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“Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?" At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this: "Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.”

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Book:Nova Express
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“The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed--they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach--the image that best expresses the child's happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they're lost or taken from him (A crime! They've made off with outward bits of his soul! They've stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.”

ChildrenHappinessDreamsConsumersBuyingConsumptionConsumerismAcquisitionBuyers
Book:The Book of Disquiet
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“Every talent God has hidden in you is not for your own consumption; they are for other people’s liberation.”

EnjoyLeadershipLibertyTalentFood For ThoughtIsraelmore AyivorLiberationEnjoymentLeadersConsumptionGiftsBeneficialMartin Luther King JrAbilitiesMartin LutherMartin Luther KingBenefitConsumeNatural Abilities
Book:Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
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“Hela villan, från den vitkalkade terassen till radioantennen, var sådan - prydlig, putsad och på det hela taget oälskad och meningslös. Husets herre betraktade den som ett skämt. Vad beträffar Martha var det varken estetiska hänsyn eller känsloskäl som styrde hennes smak, hon ansåg bara helt enkelt att en tämligen rik tysk affärsman i nittonhundratjugotalets Berlin borde ha ett hem av precis detta slag, det vill säga det skulle vara av precis samma villaförstadstyp som de hus andra personer i hans ställning hade.”

ConsumptionBourgeoisie
Book:King, Queen, Knave
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