Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.

Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.