Possessions Quotes

Money almost always ends up disappointing. Buying things to give lasing satisfaction is an illusion. Money can't buy happiness. The people with the most money are often times the MOST miserable people.

~ Lisa Bedrick

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.

~ William James

We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I have every luxury imaginable, I own acres of land, and have enough money to buy the moon were it for sale. Though people think I have everything, it sometimes feels like my possessions own me; towering over me and reducing me into a small bundle of insignificance.

~ J. Matthew Nespoli

You will never truly realize God is all you need until He becomes all you have.

~ Mother Teresa

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.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

~ Donna Tartt

The less I have, the less I can lose.

~ Dean Koontz

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.

~ Richard J. Foster

The gospel has done its work in us when we crave God more than we crave everything else in life and when seeing His kingdom advance in the lives of others gives us more joy than anything we could own. When we see Jesus as greater than anything the world can offer, we’ll gladly let everything else go to possess Him.

~ J.d. Greear

Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.

~ Piero Gheddo

If everything I possessed, vanished, suddenly,I'd be sorry.But I value things unpossessed.The wind, and trees, and sky and kind thoughts, much more.

~ Dorothy Hartley

Technologies of easy travel give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

You probably have the ability to get what you want. And you likely have everything you need to be completely satisfied. But do you also have the ability to want what you've got? That just may be one of the most important questions you will ever answer.

~ Steve Goodier

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

~ Alain De Botton

He is so rich, he has no room to shit.

~ Marcus Aurelius

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

~ Randy Alcorn

Possessions and positions may promote our happiness but cannot create it. Happiness is a state created by self through the realization of how the self is important to the creator.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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.

~ Kennedy Fraser

The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

We preoccupy ourselves with what we had — or what we want to have — at the expense of what we have.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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.

~ Alain De Botton

Many a rich man’s bed is bigger than many a poor woman’s bedroom; his bedroom, her house.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Our possessions are not ours- God has given them to us to cultivate, that we may make them fruitful and profitable in His Service, and so doing we shall please Him.

~ Francis De Sales

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

~ Allen Ginsberg

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.

~ Walter Benjamin

I don't like Paradise,As they probably don't have obsessions there.

~ Alda Merini

Sadly, when a person's possessions distract him from his purpose, he usually ends up losing both.

~ Orrin Woodward

It’s not about some principled debate as to whether I should focus on what I have, or on what I don’t have. Rather, it’s about being thankful that I have the privilege to enjoy the former, and the opportunity to contemplate the latter.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

~ Colson Whitehead

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

~ Henry David Thoreau

What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

~ Patricia Highsmith

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ego very much wants to make you think that your self worth is all about what you possess, what you've accomplished, and who you know.

~ Taite Adams

The more things I have, the more time I spend thinking about them, moving them around, fixing them, looking for them, or upgrading them.

~ Taite Adams

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

~ Laura Lippman

To possess possessions, a man will sell himself to have what another has, but it never dawns on him ~ that the more he gets, the less he keeps of himself.

~ Rius

Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

~ Colson Whitehead