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Materialism Quotes

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Materialism Quotes

“The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through. Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within.”

“Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?”

“If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.”

“Further, in the modern story, reality is that which is observable, measurable, and repeatable - the kinds of phenomena available, accessible, and verifiable to the five senses. Thus, reality comes to equal the scientific method. It should come as no surprise that in such a world the life of the spirit is ignored or marginalized (as well as a great many other nonmaterial things.) This view of life subsequently birthed in human beings a ravenous materialism as matters of the soul were ignored or reinterpreted within this tightly controlled version of reality. When the life of the spirit is ignored, people will seek to feed the hunger of a neglected soul with the only nourishment available: in our context, the consumptive acquisition of material goods.”

“I believe that secularism is not the enemy of spirituality. Our spirits are in fact secular and free. But the enemy of your spirit is materialism which produces legalism. People scramble for the "perfect law" in order fix everything, while failing to see that law only points towards what is material. And so, people find themselves going around in a circle that will never end. The key is to break away from that circle. You have to begin focusing your attention onto what is inside you and what is inside everybody else. This will in turn produce common sense, intuition, and understanding. Then comes strength.”

“I'd rather have a heart of gold Than all the treasure of the world.”

“COMING FORTH INTO THE LIGHT I was born the day I thought: What is? What was? And What if? I was transformed the day My ego shattered, And all the superficial, material Things that mattered To me before, Suddenly ceased To matter. I really came into being The day I no longer cared about What the world thought of me, Only on my thoughts for Changing the world.”

“Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism - from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism - the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar... To flood the world with images of ourselves. It is to these images and not the material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.”

“Forgive me,' Poe repeated earnestly. I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one. 'I want you to have this,' he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. 'It belonged to my father, David Poe--not John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It's said that he abandoned my mother and me. It's a lie. He died--too young: He was only twenty-seven.' I accepted his gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.”

“Once again, it is difficult to start from the premise of mindless evolution and end with the idea that humans are anything more than organisms bent on preserving and passing on their DNA. The fact that humans not only pursue art, philosophy, and science, but also exult in those things more than reproduction cannot easily be explained through materialism.”

“Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.”

“How can quantum mechanics and general relativity be reconciled? By re-casting both in terms of holography. The final scientific theory of everything will be mathematical holography, with mental nonlocality at its core. If the whole science community adopts a holographic paradigm rather than a materialist paradigm, a final theory will be available within ten years.”

“There is no such thing as randomness. No one who could detect every force operating on a pair of dice would ever play dice games, because there would never be any doubt about the outcome. The randomness, such as it is, applies to our ignorance of the possible outcomes. It doesn’t apply to the outcomes themselves. They are 100% determined and are not random in the slightest. Scientists have become so confused by this that they now imagine that things really do happen randomly, i.e. for no reason at all.”

“No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.”

“Wavefunction collapse is anything other than “random”. If you could really see what was going on, you would see that nothing ever happens randomly, any more than a dice throw produces a genuinely randomly outcome (if you could see what was going on, all the forces in play, you would know exactly what the outcome would be). Sensory ignorance is not ontological uncertainty. Reality knows exactly what it is doing even if you don’t!”

“The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl's teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl's art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl. For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking.”