materialism

We are nature; we are nature as we munch gum and check the phone; we are nature as we queasily regret our imperfection, turning the glossy page, turning our glossy stomachs; we are nature as we hear them witter inanely on the radio, desecrating the silence with the violence of their idiocy and dumb verdicts, chattering and grooming, picking through the ticks in their hair, marveling at new minutia.

It__ the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child__ mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiro__ work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. It__ an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.

I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news

....I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia__y the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)

I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment__ll alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.

And then one day you realise that if you want to be rich, you'd have to give away almost everything you own.

Three things are neededFor humanity to co-exist:Truth, peace and basic needs.Everything else -Is irrelevant.

True beauty is measured by the number of pearls within you, not those around your neck.

Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.

Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants_ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. _ they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

Experience and wisdom are more tangible than materialism.

I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

Listen.Do you see that you can__ hear snowfall?Look.Do you sensethat you can__ see love?Touch.Do you graspthat you can__ catch poems?Try.Smell this glass. Go on taste this cloud.These material senses won__ get you far untilyou feelthe velvet glove caress your soul.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.