Quotes About Ownership

Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.

The main question is "Do you own your pain?" As long as you do not own your pain—that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world—the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give. As a result, you will feel frustrated, and those you wanted to help will feel confused, disappointed, or even further burdened.

It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.

When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it.

I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his 'furniture,' as whether it is insured or not. 'But what shall I do with my furniture?'...It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.

If I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.

In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.

I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but not know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

Ci sono novecentonovantanove sostenitori della virtù ogni uomo virtuoso, ma è più facile trattare con il reale possessore di qualcosa che con il suo guardiano temporaneo.

Nuestras casas son una propiedad tan aparatosa que a menudo estamos más encerrados que alojados en ellas.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.

I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed to be poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

Her beauty belonged to all the world but her flaws belonged to him alone.

The thing so great that "private capital could not have built it" has in fact been built by private capital—the capital that was expropriated in taxes

The thing so great that "private capital could not have built it" has in fact been built by private capital—the capital that was expropriated in taxes (or, if the money was borrowed, that eventually must be expropriated in taxes).

No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies.

No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies. After

When I met Jimmy Burke in 1964, he practically owned New York's Kennedy Airport. If you ask me, they named the place after the wrong Irishman.

She envied the security of valuable 'pieces' which change by no hair's breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty[.]