Quotes About Possessions

The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.

I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing.

The haves are the haves until they have not." Now, Savattini understood the riddle.

All men are more concerned to recover what they lose than to acquire what they lack.

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.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will guarantee us an enduring satisfaction. We are led to imagine ourselves scaling the steep sides of the cliff face of happiness to reach a wide, high plateau on which to continue our lives; we are not reminded that soon after reaching the summit we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

Contentment is not achieved by having stuff. It is achieved by enjoying the stuff you have.

For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness. Some say it is true that crime is bad, but would this not be worse? Is it not better to hold what we have, and to pay the price of it with fear?

What we possess is temporary, but what we become is permanent.

Ramkrishna Paramhansa, the nineteenth-century Bengali mystic, said that the essence of The Gita can be deciphered simply by reversing the syllables that constitute Gita. So Gita, or gi-ta, becomes ta-gi, or tyagi, which means 'one who lets go of possessions.

Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.

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.

Anybody who does not feel that he would be much happier were he only permitted to understand and obey the commandments of Jesus in a straightforward literal way, and e.g. surrender all his possessions at his bidding rather than cling to them, has no right to this paradoxical interpretation of Jesus' words. We have to hold the two together in mind all the time.

Anxiety creates its own treasures and they in turn beget further care. When we seek for security in possessions we are trying to drive out care with care, and the net result is the precise opposite of our anticipations. The fetters which bind us to our possessions prove to be cares themselves.

nous avons de quoi nous vêtir et nous loger, mais nous aimerions tellement avoir des vêtements plus remarquables,

nous avons de quoi nous vêtir et nous loger, mais nous aimerions tellement avoir des vêtements plus remarquables, une demeure plus vaste, plus confortable.

It is foolish to hold tightly to material possessions. We do not own them, but they can own us.

Remove,' I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.

Whether you buy a new TV, or car, (etc.) or any other "material" thing is often "immaterial" to God.

Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions.

You spend the first part of your life collecting things ... and the second half getting rid of them.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.