Phyllis Bottome Quotes

Materialism isn't the panacea that so many people think it is.

The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words “going along”. We simply go along with the values and practices of society.

We are shallow because we have become enslaved by gross materialism, the glitter of gold and its equivalents, for which reason we think that only the material goods of this earth can satisfy us and we must therefore grab as much as can while we are able.

This has resulted in more and more people becoming inner-directed and having as their only goal, getting as much as they can get out of the system and putting as little into it as possible.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

There are a lot of things to get seduced by in America.

The mood of the 80s - Get what you can, can what you get, and sit on the can.

The great question of our time is, 'Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?'

Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence has itself betrayed us.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

Hunger for gold is made greater as more gold is acquired.

The lust of avarice as so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

Many of those who once were so passionately in love with Christ now run about pursuing their own interests. They're burdened down with stress and problems, chasing after riches and the things of this world.

The Italians of today think of the belly, not of the soul.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty.

The love of Luxury grows by what it feeds upon.

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

Buying sports cars, going to expensive nightclubs, spraying people with champagne and things like that - what I learnt is that it wasn't for me, and, in fact, I feel pretty empty after doing that.