Quotes About Possession

to lend a book is an incitement to theft. A Reader on Reading p. 281

Já eu, raramente empresto um livro. Se quero que alguém leia um certo livro, compro um exemplar e ofereço-lho. Acredito que emprestar um livro é incitar ao furto.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with I, me, mine, that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.

Todos tendemos a exagerar el valor de lo que por casualidad nos pertenece.

Unowned, the Fourth Brandenburg had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than anything he had ever found in the same music when it was his private property.

The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.

You must on no account attempt to use the squares given in the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage until you have succeeded in the Operation. More, unless you mean to perform it, and are prepared to go to any length to do so, you are a fool to have the book in your possession at all. Those squares are liable to get loose and do things on their own initiative; and you won't like it.

El estilo es de unos pocos. Surge de una intimidad muy elevada y misteriosa con un material concreto. No se puede enseñar, se posee. Es un acontecimiento.

Markets concern property, and so it's essential in markets that somebody or something be able to own something.

The realisation of our mortality came slowly, in dribs and drabs, until we bleakly acknowledged that everything was on loan to us for a short time—the world, our possessions, the people we knew and loved. But we could not spend our time dwelling on our mortality; we still had to behave as if the worst would not happen, for otherwise we would not do very much, we would be defeated and give up.

And she, Isabel, had gone along with this and all the time what was happening was she was becoming increasingly possessive of Jamie without ever having to acknowledge it. Now there was another woman, a girl really, and there was an obvious intimacy between them, which would exclude her as it would have to do, and that would be the end of everything.

Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours for ever, but we are little more than squatters.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer

Everybody wanted to look after the world, but nobody wanted to give up anything they already had.

nemo dat quod non habet.

If you lived in a house your parents lived in, then you would not have had to buy it. But the house itself represented inherited wealth, and in some eyes, that was somehow tainted.

In every country where independence has taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a weapon which at once renders him capable of defence or attack, and, by rendering its owner fearsome, makes him feared.

The greatest commodity to own is land. It is finite. God is not making any more of it.

He wanted badly to tell her that he would never leave her that she belonged to him and always would, but that was not the truth. She did not belong to him. He

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.

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

No matter how much you may love someone, you never possess them. You can only ever borrow the right to spend time with them.