"Materialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and justice have had very little to say to this war, which is an outbreak of materialism and irreligion. The peoples did not want this war; there is no hatred of one another amongst them: but the governing cliques in each country have led or driven them like sheep to the slaughter. God has been ignored; His law has been put ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... hypocritical England! This was what he had expected, coming to, such a country, where the climate was all fog, and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in profiteering and the grossest materialism. Conscious that Hannah Hobdey was murmuring, "Hear, hear!" and Jimmy Portugal sniggering, June grew ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... eye open for me. Thank you, sir. I am glad to see that men of letters are still considerate of their fellow craftsmen. Ah, you would have liked Jack London. Did you know him? You know, we live in an age of jazz. Yes, sir, the tempo is fast. Life has lost its andante. Materialism has triumphed. There is no longer room for the spirit to expand. Machines are in the way. Noises invade the sanctity of ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... called attention to the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a great outpouring of lyricism, which infused itself into prose as well as verse. When this movement had exhausted itself there came by inevitable reaction a period of materialism, when realism succeeded romanticism and prose fiction largely replaced verse. And now sociological and pseudo-scientific writings threaten the very existence of idealistic literature. And yet through it all there has been no dearth of poets. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... he owed his shoemaker. The list was long, and "bills payable" lamentable. To end this dreary balance-sheet, I took it into my head to deliver him a lecture on the morality of literature and the duty of literary men. "Art," said I to him, "must escape the materialism which oppresses and will at last absorb it. We romantics of 1828 were mistaken. We thought we were reacting against the pagan and mummified school of the eighteenth century and of the First Empire. We did not perceive that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... time being, the young men and women of our day are fast parting from their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism. Epicurism which, in my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it looks at first sight most like an angel of light. The mass, again, are fancying that they are still adhering ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... something, after all, in the unguessed riddle of the Sphinx. It is not a fable; it is a truth. There is a problem to be solved, and that monstrous creature knows it! The woman's face, the brute's body—Spiritualism and Materialism in one! It is life, and more than life; it is love. Forever and forever it teaches the same wonderful, terrible mystery. We aspire, yet we fall; love would fain give us wings wherewith to fly; but the wretched body lies prone—supine; it cannot soar ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... comprehend them without coming to see us in our own country and seeing us as we are. The great and really wonderful achievements of the German are visible and material, while ours are things of the spirit—invisible, modest, resigned. The representative spirit of Germany's materialism and heartless aggressiveness is that of the megalomaniac Nietzsche and his followers, Treitschke and von Bernhardi. The spokesmen of what is more truly Russian today are Tolstoy and Dostoievski, who have recorded forever the spirit of self-sacrifice, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... to their intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that has ever been presented. They were, too, contemporaries of Descartes, and they followed with intense interest the attempt of the great Frenchman to put philosophy in possession of a method as adequate for ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... does not know whether it was prudence, or that materialism which, though he was no philosophe, he shared with most of his contemporaries, which prevented Marivaux from completing this sharp though mildly worded criticism. The above-mentioned profane have hinted that both the placidity and the indifference of the persons concerned, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... with being the ambassador to the Court of St. James—a sufficient career in itself for most busy men—so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of her pursuit of Art for Art's sake, with being not only an ambassador but a monarch. Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... able to keep such isolated acts of faith in their place and prevent the element of the "impossible" becoming the element of the absurd. The philosophy of the complex vision, though far more sympathetic to much that is called "materialism" than to much that is called "idealism," certainly cannot itself be regarded as materialistic. And it cannot be so regarded because its central assumption and implication is the concrete basis of personality which we call the "soul." And the "soul," when we think of it as something ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... improvement by means of association and solidarity, for well-directed education of children, and for the instruction of the women. They give the young students a goal for their efforts and an ideal in life. They preach the duty of leading a faultless, spiritual life, the rejection of a crude materialism, into which the assimilation Jews, on account of the want of a worthy ideal, are only too apt to sink, and strict self-control in word and deed. They found athletic societies in order to promote the long neglected physical development ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... Reformation been thrown away? Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is neither life ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... it were peculiar. The family had just been disturbed by the visit of a ghost—a real ghost, visible, if not palpable. She was not what may be called superstitious; and though following with more or less assiduity the practices of her religion, was afflicted now and then with a fit of perfect materialism. I was surprised, therefore, to hear her relate, with every appearance of profound faith, the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... persons, here present, very possibly shrink from accepting these statements; they may be frightened by their apparent tendency towards what is called materialism—a word which, to many minds, expresses something very dreadful. But it ought to be known and avowed that the physical philosopher, as such, must be a pure materialist. His enquiries deal with matter and force, and with them alone. And whatever be the forms ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... thus humour itself,—the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers, Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can meet in ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... supposed origin in psychological, physical and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate. By reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived all really "animistic" gods, all that from the first partake of the nature of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases that hunger may have been transferred, we surmise, by worshippers to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... that on Easter is a very curious and adroit piece of criticism. I wish that Furness would not be so confident, considering the grounds he goes upon, and that he would not write so darkly upon the materialism of the age. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... publishing my memoirs, my purpose is to reveal to a world still engulfed in a vulgar materialism Your Majesty's lofty thoughts about art, poetry, and philosophy. The inspiration of this book, Sire, is due to yourself, and to those other remarkable men whom Fortune—always the protector of my younger years—has given me as ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... has had its origin in these two sources. In all the unutterably despicable work of detective agencies and police spies that has led to the destruction of property, to riots and minor rebellions that have cost the lives of many thousands in recent decades, we find the sordid materialism of special privilege seeking to gain its secret ends. In all the unutterably tragic work of the terrorists that has cost so many lives we find the rage and despair of self-styled revolutionists seeking to gain ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses? It is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... respectability—was wonderfully at odds with high tragedies of dissolution. How had the house received such a guest? How put up with her intrusion? But wasn't the house, perhaps, itself at a disadvantage, its sting drawn in presence of such invincible materialism? For how impress a creature at once so light and so pachydermatous? The position lent itself to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... easy step to the more or less material ideas of deities, which are apt at first to shock us, but which are indeed only dishonourable so far as they represent the gods as false and unholy. It is not the materialism, but the vice, which degrades the conception; for the materialism itself is never positive or complete. There is always some sense of exaltation in the spiritual and immortal body; and of a power proceeding from the visible form through ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... has been taught to think vigorously about politics and sociology; when once he has been so fired with enthusiasm for these things that he will teach and talk to others of his kind: then, at last, slowly and painfully no doubt, but none the less inevitably, will war, poverty, and materialism vanish altogether from a world not meant for them. That is why we have ventured to urge all those who both are idealists and love the public schools—but those alone—to break in on them and help to awaken the great sleeping ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... true to say that there is one offering once offered for all. But it is equally true to say that that one offering is valueless, except so far as it is completed and repeated in the life and self-offering of all. This is the Christian's sacrifice. Not mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of the mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life which is lived, not to ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... pith, embodiment, elements; importance, significance, moment, consequence, weight, materiality; pus, purulence; manuscript, copy. Associated Words: material, immaterial, materiality, immateriality, atom, molecule, chemistry, hylism, hylotheism, hylopathism, hylogenesis, materialism, physics, somatics, somatology. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a discussion the other evening — our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know — as to whether it was Idealism or Materialism that had gotten the Germans into ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... generation over the solution of the greatest of the world-problems: the genesis of living beings had been brought to light, and—a thing which admitted of no doubt—man as well as the brute creation was a product of purely natural evolution. The doctrine which materialism had already proclaimed with prophetic insight, had at length been irrefragably established on a scientific basis: God, Soul and Immortality were contemptuously relegated to the domain of nursery tales. What ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... question and that which is posterior to the first promulgation of such knowledge. In the first we find mainly the old accusations which have long ceased to exert any conspicuous influence, namely, Atheism, Materialism, and revolutionary plotting. Without disappearing entirely, these have been largely replaced in the second group by charges of magic and diabolism, concerning which the denunciations have been loud and fierce. One supplementary ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... industries have given Pittsburgh her wealth, population, supremacy, and power, commercial materialism is not the ultima thule of ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... realities of all life and all religion. There are those, I know, in our day, to whom these ideas are mere assumptions—"dogmas of a tremendous kind," to assume which is to assume everything. But with this order of thought we have in the meantime nothing to do. The questions of materialism are outside of Christianity altogether. They were nothing to Christ, whose whole thought moved in a higher sphere of personal love, embracing this lower world. The spiritual life was to Him the life of reality and fact; and so it is to all who live in Him and know in Him. The soul and ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... in that vast brain, we might have obtained affirmations of a new order. And Delsarte might have met with thinkers like Leibnitz, Descartes and Jean Reynaud, on that height where religion is purged of superstition and fanaticism, philosophy set free from atheism and materialism! ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... gallant Lovelace of ten, despite all sentiment, had basely succumbed to the gross materialism of youthful slumber. On a cot in the corner, half hidden under the wreck of his own careless and hurried disrobing, with one arm hanging out of the coverlid, Richelieu lay supremely unconscious. On the forefinger of his small but dirty hand the missing cameo was still glittering ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... towards our transatlantic kinsmen. When he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false smartness and a false audacity,—the wise American will do well to ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Robbers Shakspeare Scotch Novels Lord Byron John Kemble Mathews Parliamentary Privilege Permanency and Progression of Nations Kant's Races of Mankind Materialism Ghosts Character of the Age for Logic Plato and Xenophon Greek Drama Kotzebue Burke St. John's Gospel Christianity Epistle to the Hebrews The Logos Reason and Understanding Kean Sir James Mackintosh ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or no, and such experiences are ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Materialism and spiritualism excluded each other, but both held the Church in contempt as a "rough philosophy for the people." Yet the Church included the true parts for both, not by asserting anything about ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... terrible is it to find the body wasted, the features sharp with the great life-struggle, than to look on the face from which the mind is gone,—the eyes in which there is no recognition. Such a sight is a startling shock to that unconscious habitual materialism with which we are apt familiarly to regard those we love; for in thus missing the mind, the heart, the affection that sprang to ours, we are suddenly made aware that it was the something within the form, and not the form itself, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ambitious statesmen of the Old World, been supplanted by an open recognition that force and selfishness are primary elements in international co-operation. The League has succumbed to this reversion to a cynical materialism. It is no longer a creature of idealism. Its very source and reason have been dried up and have almost disappeared. The danger is that it will become a bulwark of the old order, a check upon all efforts to bring man again under the influence which ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... shaken." Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... ever, I hope, with this war. The old European ideal of education was so called individualistic. This ideal was supported equally by the churches and by science and art. Extreme individualism, developed in Germany more than in any other country, resulted in pride, pride resulted in materialism, materialism in pessimism. Put upon a dangerous and false base every evil result followed quite naturally. If my poor personality is of limitless value, without any effort and merit of my own, why should not I be proud? If the aim of the world's history is to produce some few genial personalities, ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... even the harmonious development of all the faculties, the one-sided, somewhat restricted, or undeveloped, view of Pestalozzi and others of his followers, surely not individual efficiency for personal gain, the selfish view of crass materialism, but social efficiency is the present-day motive in education. And the definition of education takes on a different color. Not merely the development of inner life but in conjunction with that or in addition to it, the development in the individual of the power ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... heard the materialistic tendencies of the age condemned in public, and had not been warned in private that we were all supposed to do our best to work this materialist for a million, with which to keep up the fight against materialism. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... was the moral of his time, either in theory or in its application? On one side, a gross materialism, of which the shameless maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility, not less suspicious, which, to realize ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... while the perplexed generations of men appear and disappear. Sidney and Campion and Daniel pleaded its cause for the Elizabethans, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it against the Georgian Philistines, Carlyle, Newman and Arnold championed it through every era of Victorian materialism. In the twentieth century, critics like Mackail and A. C. Bradley and Rhys, poets like Newbolt and Drinkwater and Masefield—to say nothing of living poets and critics among our own countrymen—have spoken out for poetry with a knowledge, a sympathy and an eloquence unsurpassed in any previous ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... error; it is not the method of nature, nor even that of well-ordered reason; it is to learn to see by shutting our eyes. We must have studied bodies long enough before we can form any true idea of spirits, or even suspect that there are such beings. The contrary practice merely puts materialism on ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... daily act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow along his way seeds of beauty ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... concealed an entire system of poetic materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a whole series of consequences, the logical result of which was to lead Goethe to indifference, that moral suicide of some of the noblest energies of genius. The absolute concentration of every faculty of observation ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... in which all forms of materialism are fatalistic in their relation to moral responsibility. James Buechner assures us that "what is called man's soul or mind is now almost universally conceded as equivalent to a function of the substance of the brain." Walter Bagehot, like Maudsley, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... higher; and that, accordingly, our first ideas are such as are conceived of things external and sensible. Hence all men whose intellect appeals only to external sense, are prone to a philosophy which reverses the order of things pertaining to the mind, and tends to materialism, if not to atheism. "But"—to refer again to Harris—"the intellectual scheme which never forgets Deity, postpones every thing corporeal to the primary mental Cause. It is here it looks for the origin of intelligible ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... "His music-dramas, shorn of the fetters of the actual spoken word, emancipated from the materialism of acting, painting, and furniture, must be considered the ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... in a future life is the Scientific Argument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing in the universe but bodies and the properties of bodies." This is a characteristic example of the method of the materialists: to assume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate, and that, too, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... California society. She declaimed against the prevailing tone of infidelity and scepticism in religion. Few people who were present will ever forget the dignified yet stately manner with which she rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism, lately published; and some among them, also, will not forget the expression of amused surprise on Mr. Hamilton's face, that gradually changed to sardonic gravity, as he courteously waived his point; certainly not Mr. ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... not regretfully forced into materialism by some mental confusion or obscurity, but he revels in it, and invites all to taste and see how gracious a philosophy it is. There is an ill-concealed levity and coarseness in his handling ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... elevation of Mount Olympus? But Zeus's eagle sat on it, and top me Olympus, after you have imagined the eagle aloft there! after Homer, is the meaning. That will be one of the lessons for our young Republicans—to teach them not to give themselves up to the embrace of dead materialism because, as they fancy, they have had to depend on material weapons for carving their way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidal delusion! The spiritual weapon has done most, and always does. They are sons of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were living ideals. They were not to be doffed with their khaki and overseas caps. Their country called, the whole world called, for men with faith and courage. There was no place for pessimism, no place for materialism, no ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... beloved Hypatia. You refuse to give up the beautiful, the sublime, the heavenly? What if Raphael Aben-Ezra, at least, had never found them till now? Recollect what I said just now—what if our old Beautiful, and Sublime, and Heavenly, had been the sheerest materialism, notions spun by our own brains out of the impressions of pleasant things, and high things, and low things, and awful things, which we had seen with our bodily eyes? What if I had discovered that the spiritual is not ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the rights of property and the rights of capital, to gratify ardent longings without trouble, and provide the much coveted means of enjoyment. The Titans have tried to scale the heavens, and have fallen into the most degrading materialism. Purely ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... that our failure lies in not distinguishing between idealism in itself and idealization of ourselves. We regard a man who challenges our self righteousness and self admiration as an enemy of the people. What we call our idealism is rooted in materialism and the goal we set ourselves virtuously is a goal of material comfort for ourselves, and, that once attained, perhaps also ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... merely state the question, you must solve it; I can leave you only some cursory ideas, which I am satisfied are just, and upon which you may meditate at your leisure. Only for fools or the weak does materialism become a debasing dogma; assuredly, in its code there are none of those precepts of ordinary morals which our fathers entitled virtue; but I do find there a grand word which may well counterbalance many others, that is to say, Honor, self-esteem! Unquestionably a materialist may not be a saint; ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... disease of the body is bad enough, but this seems to be a disease of the soul. Is it not a shocking thing—a thing to drive a reasoning man into absolute Materialism—to think that you may have a fine, noble fellow with every divine instinct and that some little vascular change, the dropping, we will say, of a minute spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of his brain may have the effect of ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... has been with me now for two months, and is to stay indefinitely. He is engaged on a work that will, I am convinced, add one more to the sacred books of the world. We need such men in this age of materialism, do we not? And I feel gratefully the beneficent effect of such a ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and Rome—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice—perhaps Tennyson. Browning also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boy he bought eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he did not think of becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls of men; seeking God ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... to party, the overwhelming majority of our people seek a greater opportunity for humanity to prosper and find happiness. They recognize that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through mere materialism and luxury, but that it does progress through integrity, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... The materialism of the last century seems to have maintained a strong hold upon one part of the Paris school of medicine. We do find in France a good many physicians who, like Boerhave, render homage to religion, and a good many physiologists who, like the great Haller, are ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... not altogether to be wondered at that teachers at first seized the apparatus rather than the spirit of the Kindergarten when we remember that we have not accepted in anything like its fulness the teaching of Froebel. Formalism and materialism always die slowly: play in the Board School was interpreted as something that had to be dictated and taught: the gifts, occupations and games were organised, and appeared on the time-table as subjects side by side with Wilderspin's ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to his voice when he delivered it in ardour—circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence. Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which incessant journalism is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have to risk our lives and our souls. It is discouraging when we look around us to-day, and in a way the pessimists are right when they say we don't see democracy. We see only what may be called the first stage of it; for democracy is still in a far country eating the husks of individualism, materialism. What we see is not true freedom, but freedom run to riot, men struggling for themselves, spending on themselves the fruits of their inheritance; we see a government intent on one object alone—exploitation of this inheritance in order to achieve what it calls prosperity. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... A refined materialism is stamped on all the habits of Flemish life. English comfort is harsh in tone and arid in color; whereas the old-fashioned Flemish interiors rejoice the eye with their mellow tints, and the feelings with their genuine heartiness. There, work implies no weariness, and the pipe is ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... us, that materialism makes man a mere machine, which is said to be very dishonourable. But, will it be much more honourable for man, if we should say, that he acts by the secret impulses of a spirit, or by a certain I know not what, that animates him ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... Surprise of Love—carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... whom I am acquainted, a financier from Alsace, told me that he, with two other bankers, were some weeks ago dining with the Kaiser; and the Kaiser spoke to them about the mission of Germany. He said that a great part of Europe was paralysed by materialism, that immorality had eaten out the best life of France, and was fast finding its way into the vitals of England. That Germany was called by God to purify Europe, and that he who was anointed by God to reign over Germany, ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... property. Those afflict limited classes alone, but these every class; they relax and pervert the whole moral regimen of society; and if, as it is sometimes alleged, the present age is more profoundly steeped in materialism than any before,—if its enterprise is not simply more bold, but more reckless and prodigal,—if the monitions of conscience have lost their force in practical affairs, and the dictates of religion and honor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... universities of Berlin and Vienna can scarcely be said to be threatened with permanent decline. The governments of Prussia and Austria recognize the necessity of a great university in a great capital to give tone to the administrative departments and to resist the spread of the spirit of materialism. Besides, the resident population of each of these cities is entitled to a university, and would be sufficient of itself to support one. We may rest assured, therefore, that the Prussian government will act in the future as it has done ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... blood that binds them to him, but some more ideal tie, like that between a king and his subjects, or between a patron and his clients. And they now have a religious connection also with men who are not their kindred. The national worship is inconsistent with the gross materialism of the system of kinship, and places instead of it the belief in a god further above the world, and therefore more spiritual, and obligations to men which, as they are not derived from a common blood, are ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... voice, with which Manetho thus delivered himself, shocked the Northern taste of Helwyse. Through the semi-scriptural, symbolic language, he fancied he could discern a basis of materialism so revolting that the man of the world—the lover now!—listened with shame and anger. Here was a professed worshipper of Gnulemah, who ascribed to her no nobler worth than to be the incarnation of his own desires and passions! It was abject self-idolatry, thought ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... "are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl. What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who revolts against that very spirit ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... practicable, to present a periscope of progress in all that interests the philanthropist. Almost innumerable questions are arising concerning human rights, opinions, and interests, such as, the new education, the new theology, theosophy, occultism, spiritualism, materialism, agnosticism, evolution, paleontology, ethnology, ancient religions, systems of ethics, sociology, political economy, labor and wages, co-operation, socialism, woman's progress and rights, intemperance and social evils of every grade, modern literature, the philosophy of art and oratory, revolutions ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... is, by this doctrine, a physical cause of improvement from generation to generation: and no imagination which has apprehended it can forget it; but unless you appreciate that cause in its subtle materialism, unless you see it, as it were, playing upon the nerves of men, and, age after age, making nicer music from finer chords, you cannot comprehend the principle of inheritance either in ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... and aggressive materialism now took unchecked sway, and, although bound by solemn treaties which England could not thrust aside without open violation of pledged faith, she did not hesitate. The diamonds of Kimberley in the Free State flashed with a too seductive brilliancy, and the Gold Mines ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... and as high as it could go, both in politics and in morals. On the other hand, Malebranche and the writers of Port Royal were against him; some reprehended the licentiousness of his writings; others their impiety, materialism, epicureanism. Even Pascal, who had carefully read the Essays, and gained no small profit by them, did not spare his reproaches. But Montaigne has outlived detraction. As time has gone on, his admirers and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... moment and look logically at another class of possible achievements of this wonder-working, material power. In philosophical researches, analogy is a recognized and legitimate guide to truth. Admitting, then, that pure matter has done all that materialism claims it has done in the past, let us look by the light of analogy at other and graver possibilities it may have wrought in its reckless, unrestrained creations. Time is a mighty attribute of evolutionary divinities; its power ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... that had beset him rose clearly before him; the scenes themselves stood up in their solid materialism—he could have touched the places; the people, the thoughts, the arguments that Satan had urged in behalf of sin, were reproduced with the vividness of a present time. And he knew that the thoughts were illusions, the arguments ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... healthful, and desirable. It is by no design of his, that young feet, already wavering downward, will not be strengthened to pause, to turn, to steady themselves, but will rather be lured on by his words. It is no purpose of his to make the crusts of Materialism harden still more hopelessly above the stifled soul. He designs to ridicule only that which is ridiculous. There are evidences of a purpose to relieve the darkness of his coloring in each instance by lines of light, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... young planet, representing a race that is still struggling with the lower forms of materialism, and find us so much in advance of your condition that perhaps you imagine we are perfect. We ourselves know we are far from that state, especially since we have been able to compare our development with the higher civilization of ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... above the petty matters which concern the buyer of art and perplex the producer, he pours forth his jeremiads upon the age and its art, subjecting them to indefensible comparisons with the fifteenth century and deploring the materialism ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... the Catholicism of the people rising in rage and fury against the Arianism of the courts, burnt low for a moment, and was indeed in part extinguished by the appalling misery of the material situation of Italy. Upon this materialism, the material benefits that Theodoric had undoubtedly conferred upon the Italian people, Totila, that formidable chieftain who now came to the front as the Gothic leader, based his appeal and his hope ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... gambling, mind you; no playing for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement. With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism; but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent, the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... impulse to shrink, cower, and hide, in such poor shelter as she had, grew stronger, and at last she did little more than try to sleep through the long, dreary Sabbaths, that she might have strength for the almost hopeless struggle of the week. She was unconsciously drifting into a hard, apathetic materialism, in which it was her chief effort not to think or remember—from the future she recoiled in terror—but simply to try to maintain her physical power to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Rector agreed. "But our present bishops are only one more aspect of Victorian materialism. The whole of contemporary society can be criticized in the same way. After all, we get the bishops we deserve, just as we get the politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve and the painters ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... I have read it and understand why you were so absorbed by it. It is clever, interesting, in places witty, somewhat fantastic. As to its defects, the chief of them is his pretentious crusade against materialism. Forgive me, but I can't understand such crusades. They never lead to anything and only bring needless confusion into people's thoughts. Whom is the crusade against, and what is its object? Where is the enemy and what is there dangerous ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... earlier sages) departed widely from the tenets of his master. He supposed that two discordant principles, fire and water, had, by their operation, drawn all things from chaos into order, and his metaphysics were those of unalloyed materialism. At this period, too, or a little later, began slowly to arise in Athens the sect of the Sophists, concerning whom so much has been written and so little is known. But as the effects of their lessons were not for some ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to the study of those refining and spiritualizing truths that are so far above the comprehension of the base and ignoble common herd? Indeed, he understood her language; he understood fully, why the sordid, brutal materialism of her crude and uncultured environment so repulsed and disgusted her. He understood, more fully than Kitty herself, in fact, and explained to her clearly, that her desires for the higher intellectual and spiritual life were born of her own rare gifts, and evidenced beyond all question ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... and materialism" had to be fought in the village. There was not, however, much trouble due to drink, and there was no gambling now. There might still be impropriety between young people—formerly young men used to visit the factory girls—but it was rare. Lately there had been land speculation, and some ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the fittest! Why, Samuel, the very idea is a denial of spirituality—what are we that we should call ourselves fit? To think that is to be exposed to all the base passions of the human heart—to greed and jealousy and hate! Such doctrines are the cause of all the wickedness, of all the materialism of our time—of crime and murder and war! My boy, do you read that Jesus went about, worrying about His own survival, and robbing others because they were less fit than He? Only think how it would have been with you had you been called to ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... middle of the sixteenth century, and on the choice and treatment of the subjects pertaining to the Madonna, can hardly be calculated; it was like that of Dante in the fourteenth century, but in its nature and result how different! The grand materialism of Michael Angelo is supposed to have been allied to the genius of Dante; but would Dante have acknowledged the group of the Holy Family in the Florentine Gallery, to my feeling, one of the most profane and offensive of the so-called religious pictures, in conception ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... substance straight from the hand of the Creator and be the first in all the world to impose a human will upon it is surely an occasion for solemnity and thanksgiving," he soliloquized. "How can anyone be so gross as to see only materialism in such work as this? Surely it has something of fundamental religion in it! Just as from the soil springs all physical life, may it not be that deep down in the soil are, some way, the roots of the spiritual? The soil feeds the city in two ways; it fills its belly with material food, ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant's cerebellum, and, above all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with his huge body, would have ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... retrospective; its use is to recover more systematically conceptions already extant and inevitable. It invalidates nothing in science; much less does it carry with it any rival doctrine of its own. Every philosophy, even materialism, may find a transcendental justification, if experience as it develops will yield no other terms. What has reason to tremble at a demand for its credentials is surely not natural science; it is rather those mystical theologies or romantic philosophies ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or, as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by his allies, the Encyclopaedists. While Helvetius and Holbach were expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... wise deny the good results which this Christian Catholic view of the world established in Europe. It was necessary as a wholesome reaction against the cruelly colossal materialism which had developed itself in the Roman realm and threatened to destroy all spiritual human power. As the lascivious memoirs of the last century form the pieces justificatives of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comite du salut public seems ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards again a riveder le stelle. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... "What's yours is mine, and what's mine's me own,"' observed Bundy, and during the laughter that greeted this definition Slyme was heard to say that Socialism meant Materialism, Atheism and Free Love, and if it were ever to come about it would degrade men and women to the level of brute beasts. Harlow said Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see realized, and he was afraid it was altogether too good to be practical, because ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... or is there perception too? On what grounds, if any, may the hypothesis of a self-explanatory consciousness be rejected? In how far are we warranted in supposing that innate ideas are inconsistent with pure materialism?" ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... workshops and to other able looms of the day. We can fancy the fair face of Andrea's wife being lovingly caressed by the weaver's fingers in his work; we can imagine the beauties of Titian, the sumptuousness of Veronese's feasts, and the fat materialism of Giulio Romano's heavy cherubs, all contributing to the most beautiful ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Lamprecht's psychological interpretation of recent German history. This view and the various aspects of the condition which Lamprecht describes, the relation of the materialism, the pessimism and the melancholy of such a time to the optimistic trends and the deep forward movement need a closer study than we can here give it, but may we not see in it the truth that such conditions as these are prone to cause wars as a phase of the process of the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... were differences produced by the action of the so different social and intellectual influences under which he grew up. His nature was intensely imaginative, and so was preserved from the dwarfing effect of French rationalism and materialism: their clay could not hide his light or close his eyes, for imagination sees at all points and through all disguises, and so his spiritual and intellectual nature was kept alive when all Art around him was sinking into mere shapely clay. Classic taste and rationalistic pride had left in his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... see that although recognizing the soul as immortal, considering it, not as an entity existing independent of matter, but as the spirit of matter itself, the primary religion was the exponent of the purest form of Materialism. ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And here we are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life, trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism, endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever have invented nor any so-called ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... and on the whole appreciative, yet concludes with a charge of something like blindness, in your not seeing that Natural Selection requires the constant watching of an intelligent "chooser," like man's selection to which you so often compare it; and (2) in Janet's recent work on the "Materialism of the Present Day," reviewed in last Saturday's Reader, by an extract from which I see that he considers your weak point to be that you do not see that "thought and direction are essential to the action of Natural Selection." The same objection ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... there are things more important; and among those things are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual conflict; that the passion ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. Thus it happened he became neither ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and practical disappearance. Although not blaming him unjustly, she failed to realize the spiritual piteousness of his plight. If the war has done anything in this country, it has saved the young women of the gentler classes, at any rate, from the abyss of sordid and cynical materialism. Hesitating to announce the rupture of the engagement, she allowed it to remain in a state of suspended animation, and as a symbolic act, ceased to wear the ring. Nancy's taunts had goaded her to a ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke |
