Material World Quotes - Page 6

• Something about photography is tied to a very specific relationship with the material world. It doesn't have to be, but the way I practice it, it is. So there's an act of observation, but it's not an act of objective recording. It's about framing something and seeing it and understanding that it's relational.

  Zoe Leonard

  Photography, Practice, Understanding

  Interview with Molly Prentiss, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 13, 2016.

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• If you're getting your guidance about who you are and what to do with your life only from the external world, then by definition you'll be led away from your authentic truth. Your authentic truth isn't in the material world. It's counterintuitive, but you have more power in the world when you know you're not of it.

  Marianne Williamson

  World, Definitions, Guidance

  "Marianne Williamson on Consciousness, Women and Politics". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 09, 2012.

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• The universe is made up of vibrating, pulsing light. When our attention level drops, we don't see that. Instead we see what appears to be a solid material world.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Light, Attention

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• The purely material world seems to have more in common than we with the unchanging and everlasting years of the Great Creator. Yet we know that it is not so. In reality the rocks are less enduring than man. Each man's personal self will still survive for weal or woe, when another catastrophe shall have utterly changed the surface of this planet, and the elements shall have melted with fervent heat, and the earth also and all things that are therein shall have been burnt up.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Reality, Men, Rocks

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• Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!

  Frances Wright

  Mind, Church, Leisure

  Frances Wright (1829). “Course of popular lectures; with 3 addresses on various public occasions, and a reply to the charges against the French reformers of 1789”, p.46

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• White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.

  Honore de Balzac

  Strong, Queens, Prayer

  "Seraphita". Book by Honoré de Balzac. Chapter 6: "The Road to Heaven", 1834.

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• In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Thinking, Numbers, Tasks

  "Numbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea Persists". www.nytimes.com. October 3, 2006.

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• Ballet is the body rising. Ballet is ceremonial and hieratic. Its disdain for the commonplace material world is the source of its authority and glamour.

  Camille Paglia

  Ballet, Rising, World

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is the expression of his overflowing soul. Because his soul is rich, he cares comparatively little about the superficial necessities of the material world; he sublimates the pressure of material affairs in an artistic experience.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Expression, Profound

  "Search for the Real: And Other Essays". Book by Hans Hofmann. "Painting and Culture", p. 56, 1948.

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• Little children play with dolls in the outer room just as they like, without any care of fear or restraint; but as soon as their mother comes in, they throw aside their dolls and run to her crying, "Mamma, mamma." You too, are now playing in this material world, infatuated with the dolls of wealth, honour, fame, etc., If however, you once see your Divine Mother, you will not afterwards find pleasure in all these. Throwing them all aside, you will run to her.

  Ramakrishna

  Mother, Running, Children

  Ramakrishna (1965). “Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna: the most exhaustive collection of them, their number being 1120”

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• A little exposure to the philosophy of many Eastern spiritual traditions - including yoga - could easily lead you to conclude that if you aspire to achieve goals in the material world you cannot fulfill yourself spiritually, or vice versa. However, since all of us, at some level, long for fulfillment in all aspects of our life, it is essential to understand that these two aims are not mutually exclusive.

  Rod Stryker

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Yoga

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• You can think your self to be great, you can go on thinking your self to be great, till you see all fellow devotees going Back Home Back to Godhead, while you remain in this material world only.

  Radhanath Swami

  Humility, Home, Thinking

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• Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law. ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man.

  Clarence Darrow

  Running, Moving, Men

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• But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this;-we can perceive that events are brought about, not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular ease, but by the establishment of general laws.

  William Whewell

  Science, Law, Events

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• Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Thinking, Journey, What Matters

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• The hindrances to being psychic are a general dullness that develops from living in the material world, and being a material girl.

  Frederick Lenz

  Girl, Psychics, World

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• I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.

  Patti Smith

  Beautiful, Book, World

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• Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Animal, Men, Egypt

  Rudolf Steiner (2016). “Egyptian Myths And Mysteries”, p.116, Youcanprint

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• The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

  Patti Smith

  Communication, Responsibility, Artist

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• I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Real, Godly

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• Stop using sentences in your material world that reflect what it is you do not want to be.

  Wayne Dyer

  World, Want, Materials

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• Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.

  Stanislav Grof

  Reality, Play, Creating

  Stanislav Grof, Hal Zina Bennett (2009). “The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act. All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an idea began to play in divine self–consciousness.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Real, Thinking, Self

  Aurobindo Ghose, Sri Aurobindo (1989). “The Supramental Manifestation, and Other Writings”, Lotus Press (WI)

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• The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

  Hilary Putnam

  Real, Numbers, Law

  Hilary Putnam (1979). “Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Mathematics, Matter and Method”, p.60, Cambridge University Press

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• Everybody is different and I think that we live in a material world. But for me, possessing things is not that interesting. Living in a grand environment to show myself and others that I have wealth has zero appeal. Whatever I own is temporary, since we're only here for a short period of time. It's what we do and produce, it's our actions, that will last forever. That's real value.

  Nicolas Berggruen

  Zero, Real, Thinking

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