Possession Quotes - Page 35

• The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.

  Aldous Huxley

  Sacrifice, Roots, Ties

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

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• It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!

  Victor Hugo

  Thinking, Aim Of Life, Forget

  Victor Hugo (2000). “Les Mis??rables”, p.1231, Modern Library

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• If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Love, Relationship, Moving

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “The Irrational Season”, p.44, Open Road Media

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• The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

  Paulo Freire

  Class, Privilege, Monopoly

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.42, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

  Charles Baxter

  Mean, Good Day, Angel

  Charles Baxter (2012). “The Feast of Love”, p.17, HarperCollins UK

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• We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Opponents, Virtue, Absence

  Friedrich Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale (1996). “Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.137, Cambridge University Press

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• When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

  Zoë Heller

  Existence, Thinness, Confronting

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• [Man] is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know—that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence.

  John Steinbeck

  Art, Jobs, Animal

  John Steinbeck (1995). “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”, p.89, Penguin

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• In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Men, Law, Too Much

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• By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.

  J. K. Rowling

  Mean, Destroying, Order Of The Phoenix

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• Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Sarcastic, Money, Sarcasm

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• All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Children, Opportunity, Soul

  Vladimir Nabokov (2010). “Lolita”, p.12, Vintage

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• If all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest

  Daniel Webster

  Communication, Taken, Exception

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• Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

  Alberto Manguel

  Magic, Pages, Charm

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.205, Vintage Canada

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• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thirty-something woman in possession of a satisfying career and fabulous hairdo must be in want of very little

  Shannon Hale

  Careers, Want, Littles

  Shannon Hale (2013). “Austenland: A Novel”, p.198, A&C Black

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• He was very much a man of moods, possibly owing to what is styled the artistic temperment. I have never seen, myself, why the possession of artistic ability should be supposed to excuse a man from a decent exercise of self-control.

  Agatha Christie

  Exercise, Men, Self

  Agatha Christie (1985). “Murder in Retrospect”

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• A truce to philosophy!—Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. What has been, though sweet, is gone; the present is good only because it is about to change, and the to come is all my own.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Sweet, Philosophy, Ambition

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1833). “The Last Man”, p.34

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• The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.

  Alan Paton

  Christian, Country, Practice

  Alan Paton (2003). “Cry, the Beloved Country”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

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• Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!

  Tennessee Williams

  Taken, Heart, Years

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• She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.

  Michael Cunningham

  Kind, Command, Sane

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• Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Civilization, Assumption, Importance

  Read Mercer Schuchardt, Chuck Palahniuk (2008). “You do not talk about Fight Club: I am Jack's completely unauthorized essay collection”, Benbella Books

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• When one great passion seizes possession of the soul all other feelings are crowded out.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Passion, Feelings, Soul

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• He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Delight, World, Want

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• To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

  John Banville

  Falling In Love, Cities, Firsts

  John Banville (2009). “The Untouchable”, p.31, Vintage

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• Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

  Gustave Flaubert

  Soul, Identity, Levels

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