Quotes About Acquisitiveness

He had a good healthy sense of meum, and as little of tuum as he could help.

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgment that what is needed is given and need not be seized.

The burden of what Jesus says is this: give it away. Give it away gladly. Make friends by your generosity. The door to a gospel future is by generosity, outrageous, intentional giving away in the present to create a viable future. That seems to me such an urgent word, because we are so deeply caught in cycles of greed and affluence and self-indulgence and acquisitiveness of a fearful kind that will yield no human future.

The covetous man is ever in want.

But we're all greedy to some extent.

All of us are greedy to some extent.

The cause of these uprisings was the desire to rule, rooted in acquisitiveness and the love of honor, but after a time the violence seemed to take on a life of its own.

this was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness.

The acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?

The avarice of mankind is insatiable.

Funny how long it took us to learn the simple fact that God really is a Father, as displeased with a cramped, niggardly attitude of lack as with its opposite failing of acquisitiveness. ———

Is possession a virtue? Is a lifetime of working for some rich toad a virtue? Is loyal employment in some merchant house a virtue? Loyal to what? To whom? Oh, have they paid for that loyalty with a hundred docks a week? Like any other commodity? But then, which version is truer – the virtue of self-serving acquisitiveness or the virtue of loyalty to one's employer? Are

I conclude that your particular species, Captain, advances by way of deadly incompetence, willful ignorance, deliberate misunderstanding, and venal acquisitiveness, combined with serendipitous technological superiority.

Why, Lieutenant, are you suggesting that there are forces in the Affiliation opposed to humans evolving into post-consumers, thus freeing themselves from all the pressures of conformity, rabid acquisitiveness, endlessly destructive expansion, pointless competition, and the miserable strictures of hierarchies based on who has the most wealth?

there are two things men have never been able to satisfy: their curiosity and their greed.

Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough.

A hundred long leagues is no distance for him who would quench the thirst of covetousness; but a contented mind has no solicitude for grasping wealth.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism

I didn't want either him or his cousin, I only wanted to be able to rob them in peace.

He who is greedy is always in want.

The covetous man is ever in want.

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.