Material Things Are Temporary Quotes

Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things ‘now’ or wait until ‘then.

Who are you? The personality you've constructed, and that other people have told you you are? Your name, your class, your religion? A sexuality or gender or nationality? This physical body is your house, you are the inhabitant, but the true you can only be the life force energy, the conscious awareness, the non-physical. When we focus on these lables and identify with a temporary experience, we don’t see our true selves. We see people as labels instead of infinite beings of potential. That then allows for dehumanizing each other.

We all know that feeling of wanting something so bad and then finally getting it. You feel this rush of dopamine, and then very soon after you crash and you need something else to give you that hit of dopamine. This is the vicious cycle that emerges from the empty promise of capitalism – that happiness comes from acquiring material possessions. The Native Americans have one of the most beautiful concepts in the world. They have 10,000 different languages and all these tribes and none of them have a word for ownership or possession. They know that they are just temporary stewards of the earth; no one can truly own anything.

Eternal values are much more everlasting than the temporary physical material things.

We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father's home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,—that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.

Our obsession with material things brings trouble and heartache into our lives. So we tell ourselves that we’ll do better—we commit ourselves for a time to new budgets, we go on temporary diets, we hold garage sales. But none of it lasts for long because deep inside us, we treasure the creation more than we treasure the Creator.

Don't make up problems you don't have yet. It's not a problem until it's a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway. The decisions you make today don't need to last forever. If circumstances change, your decisions CAN change. Decisions are temporary. Pay attention to today and worry about later when it gets here. Otherwise, you'll waste energy, time and money fixating on problems that may never materialize." ~ An excerpt from the awesome book, "Rework

People love for so many different reasons. Some love you for only what you can do for them. Others love you for how much money you have or various material things. Love is sometimes tossed around like throwing a bone to a dog. And, some people have love confused with lust or infatuation. Those are both temporary and artificial, not genuine.

Faith is trust and belief in a higher power. It is a dedication to the realization that there is a power greater than us through which all living things are connected. Faith brings us comfort in the knowledge that life is eternal and that our time in the material world is only temporary. Faith teaches that beyond this life there is something wonderful on the Other Side. The material world has no sorrow Heaven cannot

Many people are driven by materialism. Their desire to acquire becomes the whole goal of their lives. This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.

One way to think of architecture and construction engineering, then, is that they are the arts of battling the downward force to a standstill. We may think of certain feathery skyscrapers as having escaped gravity. They’ve done no such thing—they’ve taken the battle literally to new heights. If you think about it for a little while, you’ll see that the stalemate is only temporary. Building materials corrode, weaken, and decay, while the forces of our natural world are relentless. It’s only a matter of time.

Say what you will of religion, but draw applicable conclusions and comparisons to reach a consensus. Religion = Reli = Prefix to Relic, or an ancient item. In days of old, items were novel, and they inspired devotion to the divine, and in the divine. Now, items are hypnotizing the masses into submission. Take Christ for example. When he broke bread in the Bible, people actually ate, it was useful to their bodies. Compare that to the politics, governments and corrupt, bumbling bureacrats and lobbyists in the economic recession of today. When they "broke bread", the economy nearly collapsed, and the benefactors thereof were only a select, decadent few. There was no bread to be had, so they asked the people for more! Breaking bread went from meaning sharing food and knowledge and wealth of mind and character, to meaning break the system, being libelous, being unaccountable, and robbing the earth. So they married people's paychecks to the land for high ransoms, rents and mortgages, effectively making any renter or landowner either a slave or a slave master once more. We have higher class toys to play with, and believe we are free. The difference is, the love of profit has the potential, and has nearly already enslaved all, it isn't restriced by culture anymore. Truth is not religion. Governments are religions. Truth does not encourage you to worship things. Governments are for profit. Truth is for progress. Governments are about process. When profit goes before progress, the latter suffers. The truest measurement of the quality of progress, will be its immediate and effective results without the aid of material profit. Quality is meticulous, it leaves no stone unturned, it is thorough and detail oriented. It takes its time, but the results are always worth the investment. Profit is quick, it is ruthless, it is unforgiving, it seeks to be first, but confuses being first with being the best, it is long scale suicidal, it is illusory, it is temporary, it is vastly unfulfilling. It breaks families, and it turns friends. It is single track minded, and small minded as well. Quality, would never do that, my friends. Ironic how dealing and concerning with money, some of those who make the most money, and break other's monies are the most unaccountable. People open bank accounts, over spend, and then expect to be held "unaccountable" for their actions. They even act innocent and unaccountable. But I tell you, everything can and will be counted, and accounted for. Peace can be had, but people must first annhilate the love of items, over their own kind.

The characteristic error of the middle-class intellectual of modern times is his tendency to abstractness and absoluteness, his reluctance to connect idea with fact, especially with personal fact. I cannot recall that Orwell ever related his criticism of the intelligentsia to the implications of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but he might have done so, for the prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. It is an act that has something about it of ritual thaumaturgy—at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which gives them power on condition that they withdraw from the ordinary life of the tribe. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles and imponderables, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the material quotidian world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.

No one acts in a void. We all take cues from cultural norms, shaped by the law. For the law affects our ideas of what is reasonable and appropriate. It does so by what it prohibits--you might think less of drinking if it were banned, or more of marijuana use if it were allowed--but also by what it approves. . . . Revisionists agree that it matters what California or the United States calls a marriage, because this affects how Californians or Americans come to think of marriage. Prominent Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, no friend of the conjugal view, agrees: "[O]ne thing can be said with certainty [about recent changes in marriage law]. They will not be confined to adding new options to the familiar heterosexual monogamous family. They will change the character of that family. If these changes take root in our culture then the familiar marriage relations will disappear. They will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will be transformed into a somewhat different social form, which responds to the fact that it is one of several forms of bonding, and that bonding itself is much more easily and commonly dissoluble. All these factors are already working their way into the constitutive conventions which determine what is appropriate and expected within a conventional marriage and transforming its significance." Redefining civil marriage would change its meaning for everyone. Legally wedded opposite-sex unions would increasingly be defined by what they had in common with same-sex relationships. This wouldn't just shift opinion polls and tax burdens. Marriage, the human good, would be harder to achieve. For you can realize marriage only by choosing it, for which you need at least a rough, intuitive idea of what it really is. By warping people's view of marriage, revisionist policy would make them less able to realize this basic way of thriving--much as a man confused about what friendship requires will have trouble being a friend. . . . Redefining marriage will also harm the material interests of couples and children. As more people absorb the new law's lesson that marriage is fundamentally about emotions, marriages will increasingly take on emotion's tyrannical inconstancy. Because there is no reason that emotional unions--any more than the emotions that define them, or friendships generally--should be permanent or limited to two, these norms of marriage would make less sense. People would thus feel less bound to live by them whenever they simply preferred to live otherwise. . . . As we document below, even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? As these norms weaken, so will the emotional and material security that marriage gives spouses. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and well-being when reared by their wedded biological parents, the same erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children's health, education, and general formation. The poorest and most vulnerable among us would likely be hit the hardest. And the state would balloon: to adjudicate breakup and custody issues, to meet the needs of spouses and children affected by divorce, and to contain and feebly correct the challenges these children face.

It is hideous to contemplate such things occurring in a department under my control,” he said. “But what can one expect with the material at one’s command? The temporary civil servant is the bane of government in war-time.

four stages of competency,4 which is another (albeit more long-winded) way of saying the same thing: Stage 1: Unconsciously incompetent. This is the kid who thinks, “I’m fine. I don’t need to study math, I’ve got this.” In reality, he hasn’t a clue. This is when it’s easiest to get off track as a consultant. You can see the doomed test ahead, and you want to help him avoid the failure. But once you have offered help and he has made it clear that he doesn’t want it, you really can’t enlighten him as to his incompetence, nor should you. To be clear, this kid will bomb. . . . But then he’ll move on, and if you can help him get the message that a failure is nothing more than a temporary stumble to learn from, he will have learned a valuable lesson. Stage 2: Consciously incompetent. The kid now thinks, “Okay, wow. That was harder than I thought. I guess I need to study math.” He still doesn’t have a handle on the material, but he knows that. He’ll usually take the next step and, you know, study.

For me, an image becomes meaningless inasmuch as it’s always temporary. See, I’ve gone off on that tangent again, because you asked me about the image and all that. I just couldn’t relate to all that side of things because, all that time, I was focused on trying to make the music sound half-way decent.

When you have peace & purpose, you don't 'need' escapism For sure, let your hair down & treat yourself every so often, but never get FOMO "Missing out" on shallow, superficial, temporary fun, material and things to build, create & provide is never a loss. Stay focussed!

Page 240: [Michael] Walzer transfers responsibility for realizing the old cultural-pluralist fantasy from the all-too-assimilated white ethnics to new ethnic groups from other parts of the world. “Whatever regulation is necessary—we can argue about that—the flow of people, the material base of multiculturalism, should not be cut off.” Walzer hopes that separate ethnic communities in the United States can be kept alive artificially, to prevent the development of a common American cultural identify: “If that vitality cannot be sustained, pluralism will prove to be a temporary phenomenon, a way station on the road to American nationalism.” Assimilation, or nationalism, is a misfortune: “A radical program of Americanization would really be unAmerican. … The public schools, according to Walzer, must be structured to actively discourage the assimilation of immigrants to the majority heritage: “Strengthen the public schools, and focus them … on two things: first, the history and contemporary forms of democratic politics, and second, the immigrant experience.” In Walzer’s view, then, everyone in America should have an ethnic nationality—with the exception of “generic” Americans: “A certain sort of communitarianism is available to each of the hyphenate groups—except, it would seem, the American-Americans, whose community, if it existed, would deny the Americanism of all the others.

At least at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which confers power in exchange for the withdrawal from ordinary life of the tribe. Or we are like the adventuring youngest son who is kind to some creature on his travels and receives in reward a magical object. By intellectuality we are freed from the commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractibility of family things. It gives us power over intangibles, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of this world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned -- by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.

Temporary solitude from all things in this life, the meditation within yourself about the divine, is food as necessary for your soul as material food is for your body

I am making a path of breadcrumbs back to one’s true divine and peaceful nature. Every historic period needs some breadcrumb-makers. It is difficult for some to hear the voices of the Divine Spirit. This may be because some are so invested in material things. I understand. I feel a deep compassion for these human beings. Material things are a temporary relief from pain. ~ Kuan Yin

Looking for happiness in the wrong places He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves abundance with its income. This too is vanity. —Ecclesiastes 4:10 As Solomon’s wealth grew, so did his arrogance, and he set aside his wisdom and the values that he knew to be right. He set himself on a course of trying anything and everything he wanted, from hedonism to horticulture. And toward the end of his life, he concluded that it was all an exercise in what he called vanity. Vanity is that which looks marvelous on the surface but, when examined more closely, turns out to be of little worth. At the end of Solomon’s life, he concluded that acquiring anything that lacks eternal purpose or value was empty in its power to provide true happiness. No matter what material things a person acquires, they soon lose their appeal, and the temporary happiness they provided subsides.

For those who haven’t found that sense of purpose, life can feel more externally motivated, focused on material things or temporary escapes.