Quotes About Possessions

Material possessions, in themselves, are good. We would not survive for long without money, clothing and shelter. We must eat in order to stay alive. Yet if we are greedy, if we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, then we make our possessions into a false god. How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can! But this is to make possessions into a false god. Instead of bringing life, they bring death.

No matter how many possessions we acquire, they will not provide us with any lasting happiness and freedom. On the contrary, it is often our pursuit of material possessions that causes our problems. If we want ultimate happiness and freedom from suffering, we must engage in the supreme practices of training the mind. There is no other way.

People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

He who seeks possessions for himself will never find them-until he begins to give of the abundance of possessions which he already has.

So there is nothing to be proud of these worldly possessions. What you are to be proud of, or to be conscious of is your spirit. Spirit is the only thing that can kindle another spirit.

Of all the animal creations of God, main is the only animal who has been created in order that he may know his Maker. Man's aim is life is not therefore to add from day to day to his material prospects and to his material possessions, but his predominant calling is, from day to day to come nearer to his own Maker.

Our possessions can be deadly. They can be subtly deadly.

Peace is worth more than all worldly possessions; in addition, God rewards it even in this life.

I testify that no one of us is less treasured or cherished of God than another. I testify that He loves each of us—insecurities, anxieties, self-image, and all. He doesn’t measure our talents or our looks; He doesn’t measure our professions or our possessions. He cheers on every runner, calling out that the race is against sin, not against each other.

Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy.

Sometimes we hold on to our possessions because we fear we might run out - life seems scarce. But when we believe that giving is the way to live, we will produce more in the future - life seems abundant.

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives.

Each of us will eventually give away all our earthly possessions. How we choose to do so, however, is a reflection of our commitment to the kingdom of God.

On every dishonest man, there are two watchmen, his possessions, and his way of living.

Prostitutes are the inevitable product of a society that places ultimate importance on money, possessions, and competition.

Giving up everything must mean giving over everything to kingdom purposes, surrendering everything to further the one central cause, loosening our grip on everything. For some of us, this may mean ridding ourselves of most of our possessions. But for all of us it should mean dedicating everything we retain to further the kingdom. (For true disciples, however, it cannot mean hoarding or using kingdom assets self-indulgently.)

I left the convent and that was because I wasn't a very good nun. I could see that I wasn't going to make it. It's very difficult to be a nun, or to live a religious life. It's very difficult to live a life of total celibacy or a life without any possessions or material responsibilities at all, or in total obedience to somebody else, and remain a mature whole human being, and I knew that I wasn't going to be one of those.

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

Possessions only provide temporary happiness.

A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

[Concerning monotheistic religions] The only thing these hysterical cults have in common is the belief that this world will be consumed, and deservedly so, when the moment is ripe. They also, all of them, profess a great disdain for earthly possessions. Yet they pass the intervening time in haggling over the most trivial and paltry property rights, over caves and rocks and disputable pieces of archeological rubbish.

I really think I want to live in a lot of places.I don't want possessions to hold me down.

When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

Sheep, cattle, men-servants were all possessions to be sold as it pleased their masters. It were a good thing were it still so. For else no man may compel nor tame the servile folk.

Real bibliophiles do not put their books on shelves for people to look at or handle. They have no desire to show off their darlings, or to amaze people with their possessions. They keep their prized books hidden away in a secret spot to which they resort stealthily, like a Caliph visiting his harem, or a church elder sneaking into a bar. To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope-fiend with those of a miser.

Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth.

O, that we who declare war against wars, and acknowledge our trust to be in God only, may walk in the light, and therein examine our foundation and motives in holding onto money! May we look upon our estates, our treasures, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these, our possessions.

We are not our bodies, our possessions, or our careers. Who we are is DIVINE LOVE and that is INFINITE.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

We packed up all the worldly possessions we could carry with us and took the next flight to Hawaii from Washington. It took just about every cent my family had to our name just to pay the plane fare. When we arrived, we had about $15 left among us. We were really in pitiful shape. But we were together, and we were alive, and this was all that mattered.

We have no money. We have no possessions. Maybe that is why we value the things we do have ... loyalty and friendship.

Never measure your life by possessions. Measure it by the hearts you've touched, the smiles you created & the love you shared.

A man's 'original and natural right' to make all contracts that are 'intrinsically obligatory,' and to coerce the fulfillment of them, is one of the most valuable and indispensable of all human possessions.

When a little pleasure has flashed for a moment against the dark, I have made that jewel mine. I have hundreds of them ... I call it my Necklace of Perfect Joy. When the world goes wrong, I have only to close my eyes and remember all the links in my chain, set with gems, some large and some small, but all beautiful with the beauty which never fades. It is all I can take with me when I go. My material possessions must stay behind, but my Necklace of Perfect Joy will bring me happiness to the end, when I put it on, to be nevermore unclasped.

Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you're forced to look for meaning within yourself Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you 'find yourself', it's because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind - it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true self.

Voluntary simplicity has more to do with the state of mind than a person's physical surroundings and possessions.

It is Enterprise which build and improves the world's possessions...If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing.

I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always.

I tend to look out for things with a resonance to my youth—artists or objects that seemed romantic all those years ago. I never buy anything purely for its value. I like possessions that smile back at me.

My hunch, for what it's worth, is that most of us probably find it much, much harder than we realize to really imagine what catastrophe is like. I have a hunch that we all labor under this rather convenient illusion that if we read about the Syrian refugee crisis, we can imagine what it feels like to set off from your home and your life with all your possessions in two bin liners. We all think that we can imagine that and my guess is that none of us have got a clue.

All our possessions are as nothing compared to health, strength, and a clear conscience.

We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.