
“The important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out.”
Saul Leiter
more infosource: In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, directed by Tomas Leach (2014).
category: edit, materialism, omission, stuff, subtraction
medium: Documentary film
via: Beverly Bader“Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?”
Jack Gilbert
more infosource: “Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91,” interviewed by Ted Widmer, in Issue 175 of The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005.
category: car, life, materialism, observation, poet, school of life, vacation, values
medium: Interview
“Let’s understand that things are thieves of time because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.”
Paul Hawken
more infosource: The 11th Hour, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen; distributed by Warner Independent Pictures; and released August 2007.
category: consumerism, economy, materialism, time
medium: Film
“Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.”
Leonard Koren
more infosource: Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1994), 59.
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category: design, materialism, selection, stuff, wabi sabi
medium: Design Philosophy
“Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly. I want to break the loop with this bike. I’m going to ride it for thirty years or more and I want to savor the process of acquiring it. I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it.”
Robert Penn
more infosource: It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 11.
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category: bicycle, consumerism, materialism, quality, workmanship
medium: Nonfiction
”For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world.”
E. B. White
more infosource: “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3.
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category: materialism, moving house, stuff
medium: Essay
“A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day—smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them.”
E. B. White
more infosource: “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 4.
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category: materialism, stuff
medium: Essay
“I’m not somebody who likes to possess. I’m not the person who has six hundred suits. I want to have two suits. Actually, I want to have one suit, and I replace it.”
Tomas Maier
more infosource: “Just Have Less: Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier,” by John Colapinto, The New Yorker, January 3, 2011, 34.
category: clothes, fashion, materialism, possession, stuff, suit
medium:
“Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything.”
Robin Nagle
more infosource: Interview in The Believer, September 2010.
category: disposable, garbage, materialism, trash
medium: Interview
“One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is! Less taking up and down of hems, less mending, and—best of all—less worry about what to wear. One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 24–25.
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category: beach, clothes, materialism, ocean, paring down, sea, shed, simplicity, stuff
medium: nonfiction
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
Kurt Vonnegut
more infosource: Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dial Press, 2005) 49.
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category: America, gift shop, life, materialism
medium: science fiction
“When it comes to learning to control the body and its experiences, we are as children compared to the great Eastern civilizations. In many respects, what the West has accomplished in terms of harnessing material energy is matched by what India and the Far East have achieved in terms of direct control of consciousness.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
more infosource: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 103.
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category: body, consciousness, materialism, meditation
medium: nonfiction (psychology/self-help)
“I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own…It started a couple of years ago. It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don’t want it. You don’t use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought ‘I don’t want this stuff, I didn’t ask for it.’ So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn’t stop.”
Vincent Kartheiser
more infosource: “The Observer,” by Tim Adams, in The Guardian, Sunday, April 25, 2010.
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category: awards, consumerism, Golden Globes, Mad Men, materialism, paring down, stuff
medium: newspaper profile
notes: Vincent Kartheiser plays Pete Campbell in the television series Mad Men


materialism