Material Quotes - page 8

I've always chosen all my own material; no one ever told me what to sing or how to sing it, but I've always been pressured intensely to use musicians outside of my band. (Jane Monheit)
We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial. View quote
George Steiner
The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists. View quote
Herbert Read
How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material. View quote
Elizabeth Hardwick
What is man? ... What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force. View quote
Benjamin Peirce
What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers? View quote
Lewis Mumford
Taking courage and looking forward from the standpoint of higher ideas born of the multiplication of the arts, they gave up huts and began to build houses with foundations, having brick or stone walls, and roofs of timber and tiles; next, observation and application led them from fluctuating and indefinite conceptions to definite rules of symmetry. Perceiving that nature had been lavish in the bestowal of timber and bountiful in stores of building material, they... embellished them with luxuries. View quote
Vitruvius
The winter oak... is very useful in buildings but when in a moist place it takes in water to its centre... and so it rots. The Turkey oak and the beech both... take in moisture to their centre and soon decay. White and black poplar, as well as willow, linden, and the agnus castus... are of great service from their stiffness. ...they are a convenient material to use in carving. View quote
Vitruvius
The certain way to victory...lies in making everything on Imperial soil contribute to the war effort...combining the total material and spiritual strength of the nation... View quote
Yoshijirō Umezu
It's a mental fake-out to myself. I make believe I'm making a new show so I forget the material I was working on and make up some fresh material. View quote
Eric Bogosian
I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material. (Michael J. Sandel)
Human artifacts not only include material structures and objects, such as buildings, machines, and automobiles, but they also include organizations, organizational structures like extended families . . . tribes, nations, corporations, churches, political parties, governments, and so on. Some of these may grow unconsciously, but they all originate and are sustained by the images in the human mind. View quote
Kenneth Boulding
The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible. View quote
William H. Prescott
[N]o people ever did or ever can attain a worthy civilization by the satisfaction merely of material needs... View quote
Louis Brandeis
No progress, either moral or material, can be made in a world which is frozen, like ours, into a rigid mold of suppression of liberties. View quote
Damon Knight
No age can have everthing and in material ways ours is more fortunate than any preceding one. Our ancestors appear to have mastered the art of living better than we are able to when an easy conscience, largely due to the unshaken faith of the time, left a marging of spiritual energy with which to enjoy life. View quote
Flora Thompson
Only what coronation is in an earthly way, baptism is in a heavenly way; God's authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality. View quote
Frederick William Robertson
We comprehend the earth only when we have known heaven. Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma. View quote
Joseph Joubert
All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own. View quote
Peter Greenaway
There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny. View quote
Lascelles Abercrombie
Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material. (Anton Chekhov)
By narcissism is meant ceasing to have an authentic interest in the outside world but instead an intense attachment to oneself, to one's own group, clan, religion, nation, race, etc. - with consequent serious distortions of rational judgment. In general, the need for narcissistic satisfaction derives from the necessity to compensate for material and cultural poverty. View quote
Erich Fromm
To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman. View quote
Che Guevara
It [number] preconsciously orders both psychic thought processes and the manifestations of material reality. View quote
Marie-Louise von Franz
The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility. View quote
Bill Moyers