It is wiser to love who you are than what you want.

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?

The more material we lose, the less we have. The less we have, the more we win.

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.

Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.

We are generally treated based on how much or little we have, earn, or know—or seem to have, earn, or know.

The truth is precious commodity, not everyone will possess her.

One of the most painful realizations in life is to all of a sudden discover that you had possessed things all along that you never knew you had.

He explained that often times it's the love of something- like money, material, possessions, or power-and the fear of losing them, that command people to act. That love and fear are really the only two things that can forever alter a person, whether for the better or worse.

And when the earth began to rumble and quake, as fear and frantic set in, he ran back inside the house past his wife and children, gathering all the valuables and things he thought of importance, and ran back to his car packing away. After making two trips in and out, he waited in the car for his family to come out, in fear they darted through the darkness and pelting cold rain. When everything calmed down, and the house was intact and safe, he returned putting everything back in its place, had the kids go to bed, told his wife he loves her and turned off the light.

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

The greatest profit you make in business is not money, but happiness. The greatest riches you give in life are not possessions, but love. The greatest treasures you acquire in life are not jewels, but joy.

If all you have is money, you are among the poorest people in the world.

The greatest things to have can't be possessed, they exist within yet can be shared, like freedom, love, trust, integrity, fun, dreams, creativity, wisdom, peace.

it is good to have wealth. It is great to leave in comfort. It is awesome to obtain possessions but, don't be too eager for material possessions for the same material possessions that bring joy are the same possessions that bring sorrow and pain and also leave a big had I know on our minds

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.

[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.

Beauty and desire to possess have driven men mad for centuries.

Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

We humans are like squirrels who spend all summer gathering and hoarding nuts and when winter comes can't remember where they are.

And then one day you realise that if you want to be rich, you'd have to give away almost everything you own.

You will be remembered more for your bangs in life, than the bling.

You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it

There is a powerful relationship between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions.

Unfortunately, we do not often see the advantages in the power of values and virtues. We are easily taken away by physical wealth, material possessions and the power of money.

These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.

Nothing in the tangible word that isn't living has any value beyond a dollar amount. Considering that dollars can only buy more tangible and inanimate objects, it would seem a far more worthwhile goal to instead learn to place value on the treasures of the mind. Memories, knowledge and skill together are the only things we will ever actually own.

The meaning of life in western secular society is to be successful. So many people are success mad and they are encouraged to reach for something and have so called "worthwhile goals". Money, fame, power, good looks, possessions are the indicators of success and the media and advertising companies exploit this. People are conditioned to believe that they can only feel happy or good about themselves if they have these things. This of course is not true.

The vanities of life:pleasure, possession, position and power.

You’ve seen the world, and all you’ve seen is nothing; and everything, as well, that you have said and heard is nothing. You’ve sprinted everywhere between here and the horizon; it is nothing. And all the possessions you’ve treasured up at home are nothing.

Life is not about possessions, it is about purpose, perseverance and passion.

You know, there’s no pleasure like the joy of being a sexual woman. You can take your careers, your money, your houses and possessions, and you go and throw them in a

You know, there’s no pleasure like the joy of being a sexual woman. You can take your careers, your money, your houses and possessions, and you go and throw them in a lake. Because life is really all about sex. That’s what I keep learning, again and again. It’s the most important thing, woven into the very centre of life. And I just know I was put on this earth to be a sexual woman, and to explore as much about sex as I can.

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.

Fine Things are reservoirs for the heart.

Idolatry happens when you worship or praise anything excessively to the point of causing you to believe it reigns supreme. All things on this earth are temporal, even your very own desires. Be careful that you do not create idols to worship.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The less I have, the less I can lose.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When someone says "I Love You," it is imperative that you know if you are loved for "WHAT you are" or "WHO you are." When the academic qualifications, professionals, positions, possessions, good look, fat bank accounts and all that has been acquired over the years are taken away, all that is left is "Who you are" - Your Personality (character, values, perceptions.)"We are never truly loved, until we are loved for WHO and not WHAT we are

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

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

You only truly possess that which you cannot lose in a shipwreck.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

Those that much covet are with gain so fond,For what they have not, that which they possessThey scatter and unloose it from their bond,And so, by hoping more, they have but less;Or, gaining more, the profit of excessIs but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

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.

Give with a free hand, but give only of your own.

I learned that you can't truly own anything, that true ownership comes only in the moment of giving.

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)

A heart anchored in money will only drift away.

Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from it.

You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there's no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

Dogs have more love than integrity. They've been true to us yes but they haven't been true to themselves.

Love me love my dog.

It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.

The better I get to know men the more I find myself loving dogs.

Love for a dog during childhood is one of the deepest and purest emotions we are ever likely to have and it remains with us for the rest of our lives. For some people their first experience with love is with a dog. The fact that the dog returns the love so fiercely so openly so unambivalently is for many children a unique and lasting experience.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations.

There is no reciprocity. Men love women women love children children love hamsters.

Love conquers all things except poverty and a toothache.

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

Man has bought brains but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit but he has been utterly helpless before love. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.

If it's true that men are such beasts this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers.

If we love our country we should also love our countrymen.

I really love pets. They're like children. They know if you really love them or not. You can't fool them.

Be unselfish in your love. Remember you are not the cat.

When a man is small he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.

There is a wide difference between having poison and being poisoned. All apothecaries have poisons ready for special uses, but they are not consequently poisoned, because the poison is only in their shop, not in themselves; and so you many possess riches without being poisoned by them, so long as they are in your house or purse only, and not in your heart. It is the Christian's privilege to be rich in material things , and poor in attachment to them.