Quotes About Possessions

If you could pack for heaven, this was how you'd do it, touching everything, taking nothing.

When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched... Because, a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything to say, 'The whole world is mine.' 'But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson...' 'We can take nothing with us.

When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?" He made a fist. "Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, 'The whole world is mine.' "But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson." What lesson? I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. "We can take nothing with us.

By dawn, June 18, 1778, an eerie silence surrounded the docks of Philadelphia, which were strewn with tables, chests and other household goods. Tossed overboard by the departing British to make room for military gear, those possessions were the remaining personal effects of the three thousand Tories who had streamed onto British ships and sailed for New York City the preceding day.

The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours…" "…except your dreams.

You mean like money?

I don't collect any memorabilia. I wish I'd have kept everything I had. But who knew you had to keep it. Just gave it away. And we lost so much and we didn't look after a lot of it.

Well, honey, I had the million dollar houses, I had the car, I had the horse, I had the barn; I had everything. Was I set free? I didn't even know what that meant.

L'accumulation est le trésor paradoxal du pauvre ; les riches sont minimalistes.

Why are so few people in America affluent? Even most households with six-figure annual incomes are not affluent. These people have a different orientation than does Johnny Lucas. They believe in spending tomorrow's cash today. They are debt-prone and are on earn-and-consume treadmills. To many of them, those who do not display abundant material possessions are not successful. To them, nondisplay-oriented people like Johnny Lucas are their inferiors. Johnny

How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

Joe had long resented how American culture had taught him to want. There were so many things pictured in ads, displayed in store windows: stereo TVs, personality dolls, electronic board games, inboard-outboard motors, personalized bowling balls, graphite baitcasting rods. You were taught to want it all.

It is easier to accept your limits if you have a biblical view of success. The world defines success in terms of what a person possesses, controls, or accomplishes. God defines success in terms of faithful obedience to his will. The world asks, 'What results have your achieved?' God asks, 'Were you faithful to my ways?

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.

Stuff accumulates in people's lives, in part, because when faced with a specific act of elimination it's easy to worry, "What if I need this one day?," and then use this worry as an excuse to keep the item in question sitting around.

The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions ... What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau's obsession with calculation runs deep ... He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?

She cautioned her prosperous friends to live united to God's will. She also stressed that there is goodness in material possessions, for God wishes us to live in the joy of his gifts. But she also cautioned us that we must not love these gifts in such a way that, instead of our possessing them, they begin to possess us.

We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment's notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return.

it. Such is the perversity of human nature that what we have in abundance-our work, our possessions, and the beauty of our surroundings-we take for granted and learn to ignore, so that we are often paralyzed by boredom, indifference, and ingratitude.

You actually don't need much. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have it all.

Fy on possessiounBut if a man be vertuous withal.

The wealthy have nothing left except money.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

We are enriched by not what we posses, but by what we can do without.