Quotes about possessions

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it f

One of the most painful realizations in life is to all of a sudden discover that you had possessed things all along that you never knew you had.

He explained that often times it's the love of something- like money, material, possessions, or power-and the fear of losing them, that command people to act. That love and fear are really the only two things that can forever alter a person, whether for the better or worse.

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

The truth is precious commodity, not everyone will possess her.

it is good to have wealth. It is great to leave in comfort. It is awesome to obtain possessions but, don't be too eager for material possessions for the same material possessions that bring joy are the same possessions that bring sorrow and pain and also leave a big had I know on our minds

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

The greatest things to have can't be possessed, they exist within yet can be shared, like freedom, love, trust, integrity, fun, dreams, creativity, wisdom, peace.

Unfortunately, we do not often see the advantages in the power of values and virtues. We are easily taken away by physical wealth, material possessions and the power of money.

You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it

There is a powerful relationship between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions.

These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.

We humans are like squirrels who spend all summer gathering and hoarding nuts and when winter comes can't remember where they are.

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.

Beauty and desire to possess have driven men mad for centuries.

Nothing in the tangible word that isn't living has any value beyond a dollar amount. Considering that dollars can only buy more tangible and inanimate objects, it would seem a far more worthwhile goal to instead learn to place value on the treasures of the mind. Memories, knowledge and skill together are the only things we will ever actually own.

You’ve seen the world, and all you’ve seen is nothing; and everything, as well, that you have said and heard is nothing. You’ve sprinted everywhere between here and the horizon; it is nothing. And all the possessions you’ve treasured up at home are nothing.

Life is not about possessions, it is about purpose, perseverance and passion.

You will be remembered more for your bangs in life, than the bling.

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.

You will never truly realize God is all you need until He becomes all you have.

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

The less I have, the less I can lose.

The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.

You know, there’s no pleasure like the joy of being a sexual woman. You can take your careers, your money, your houses and possessions, and you go and throw them in a

Money almost always ends up disappointing. Buying things to give lasing satisfaction is an illusion. Money can't buy happiness. The people with the most money are often times the MOST miserable people.

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.

Fine Things are reservoirs for the heart.

I have every luxury imaginable, I own acres of land, and have enough money to buy the moon were it for sale. Though people think I have everything, it sometimes feels like my possessions own me; towering over me and reducing me into a small bundle of insignificance.

There is a wide difference between having poison and being poisoned. All apothecaries have poisons ready for special uses, but they are not consequently poisoned, because the poison is only in their shop, not in themselves; and so you many possess riches without being poisoned by them, so long as they are in your house or purse only, and not in your heart. It is the Christian's privilege to be rich in material things , and poor in attachment to them.

True love is not in possessions or obsessions it is in appreciation.

You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there's no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

Dogs have more love than integrity. They've been true to us yes but they haven't been true to themselves.

Love me love my dog.

It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.

The better I get to know men the more I find myself loving dogs.

Love for a dog during childhood is one of the deepest and purest emotions we are ever likely to have and it remains with us for the rest of our lives. For some people their first experience with love is with a dog. The fact that the dog returns the love so fiercely so openly so unambivalently is for many children a unique and lasting experience.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations.

I really love pets. They're like children. They know if you really love them or not. You can't fool them.

There is no reciprocity. Men love women women love children children love hamsters.

Love conquers all things except poverty and a toothache.

Be unselfish in your love. Remember you are not the cat.

When a man is small he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

Man has bought brains but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit but he has been utterly helpless before love. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.

If it's true that men are such beasts this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers.

If we love our country we should also love our countrymen.

Our possessions are not ours- God has given them to us to cultivate, that we may make them fruitful and profitable in His Service, and so doing we shall please Him.

We preoccupy ourselves with what we had — or what we want to have — at the expense of what we have.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

If inanimate objects are left to stand in their world, and are not invited out to mingle with our sense of self, they will quietly console and delight us. But to bind possessions up closely with the mind is less than fair to both.

You probably have the ability to get what you want. And you likely have everything you need to be completely satisfied. But do you also have the ability to want what you've got? That just may be one of the most important questions you will ever answer.

Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

He is so rich, he has no room to shit.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive

The gospel has done its work in us when we crave God more than we crave everything else in life and when seeing His kingdom advance in the lives of others gives us more joy than anything we could own. When we see Jesus as greater than anything the world can offer, we’ll gladly let everything else go to possess Him.

If everything I possessed, vanished, suddenly,I'd be sorry.But I value things unpossessed.The wind, and trees, and sky and kind thoughts, much more.

Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beaut

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

Ego very much wants to make you think that your self worth is all about what you possess, what you've accomplished, and who you know.

The more "things" I have, the more time I spend thinking about them, moving them around, fixing them, looking for them, or upgrading them.

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

Sadly, when a person's possessions distract him from his purpose, he usually ends up losing both.

You only truly possess that which you cannot lose in a shipwreck.

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

It’s not about some principled debate as to whether I should focus on what I have, or on what I don’t have. Rather, it’s about being thankful that I have the privilege to enjoy the former, and the opportunity to contemplate the latter.

When someone says "I Love You," it is imperative that you know if you are loved for "WHAT you are" or "WHO you are." When the academic qualifications, professionals, positions, possessions, good look, fat bank accounts and all that has been acquired over the years are taken away, all that is left is "Who you are" - Your Personality (character, values, perceptions.)"We are never truly loved, until we are loved for WHO and not WHAT we are

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.

I don't like Paradise,As they probably don't have obsessions there.

Those that much covet are with gain so fond,For what they have not, that which they possessThey scatter and unloose it from their bond,And so, by hoping more, they have but less;Or, gaining more, the profit of excessIs but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.

Giving up everything must mean giving over everything to kingdom purposes, surrendering everything to further the one central cause, loosening our grip on everything. For some of us, this may mean ridding ourselves of most of our possessions. But for all of us it should mean dedicating everything we retain to further the kingdom. (For true disciples, however, it cannot mean hoarding or using kingdom assets self-indulgently.)

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

To possess possessions, a man will "sell himself" to have what another has, but it never dawns on him ~ that the more he gets, the less he keeps of himself.

Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

A heart anchored in money will only drift away.

Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from it.

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them....Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

Give with a free hand, but give only of your own.

I learned that you can't truly own anything, that true ownership comes only in the moment of giving.

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.