Bruce Dickinson Quotes

There is a big confusion in this country over what we want verses what we need...you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

I'm not an overly material person. Sure, I like certain comforts in life. But buying a lot of 'things' doesn't produce happiness for me.

Happiness will come from materialism, not from meaning.

People are often reproached because their desires are directed mainly to money and they are fonder of it than of anything else. Yet it is natural and even inevitable …. every other blessing can satisfy only one desire and one need; for instance, food is good only to the hungry, wine only for the healthy, medicine for the sick, a fur coat for winter, women for youth, and so on... Money alone is the absolutely good thing because it meets not merely one need in concreto, but needs generally in abstracto.

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.

I already own more than any human being needs.

People will always choose more money over more sex.

I've bought every toy I ever wanted.

You want the people to know, but you don't really want the things behind it. I have everything I ever wanted. I never wanted a big house. I never wanted a Ferrari. I mean, as I proceeded with the music, I started liking Ferraris...

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

Poor is the man who desires a lot

I don't care where I sit, as long as I get fed.

To build enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of, but to add a few yards of land to your field, to plant an orchard, or enlarge a dwelling, to always be making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort and almost without cost. These are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven.

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done.

It is only luxury and avarice that make poverty grievous to us; for it is a very small matter that does our business, and when we have provided against cold, hunger, and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.

The belly comes before the soul.

The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.

I used to think that having many material things would increase one's stock of happiness. I found that to be completely untrue. The trappings don't make the man at all.

We have become dangerously comfortable- believers ooze with wealth and let their addictions to comfort and security numb the radical urgency of the gospel.

How much money does it take to make a man happy? Just one more dollar.

We humans are more concerned with having than with being.

What people need and what they want may be very different.

Man needs so little... yet he begins wanting so much.

How few our real wants, and how vast our imaginary ones!