#possession

The real duty of man is not to extend his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs, but to enrich and enjoy his imperishable possession: his soul. ↗

— Gilbert Highet

#duty #enjoy #enrich #extend #his

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society. ↗

— David Hume

#alone #avidity #destructive #directly #friends

Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit! ↗

— Mother Jones

#child #city #city hall #day #hall

Every man judges his own happiness and satisfaction with life in terms of his possession or lack of possession of those things that he considers worthwhile and valuable. ↗

— Meir Kahane

#every #every man #happiness #his #judges

Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions. ↗

— Stefan Kanfer

#away #cannot #explained #grief #life

This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#intimate #literature #most #part #possession

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. ↗

— John Keats

#brood #could #death #hour #i

The lands granted were in the occupancy of savages and situated in a wilderness, of which the government had never taken possession, and of which it could not with its own citizens ever have taken possession. ↗

— William H. Wharton

#could #ever #government #granted #had

It’s like um… I’ve become used to change I think from my life, when I was younger when I lived with my mum for awhile, we used to move house every like six months, you know, and I sort of became used to things changing all the time… It was like, I learned to like it. It got the point where you travel, like you start to reduce the amount of possessions you have… You start to, you know… If you live in one place, same house, same friends, same job for years and years and years, and the same possessions and everything, then you start to believe that is your identity. Um… I have none of those things, I have no consistency, and I like that. Everything’s changing all the time so, when everything does change around you and you become used to changing, you become in-touch with the one thing that is consistent… And the thing that is consistent is something inside you which is like, not really that individual, it’s not like a pure individual, it’s something that everyone has inside them I think. And you realize that there’s no such thing as an individual, we’re just all a collection of each other’s influence on each other. Everyone says things to each other, the television, your parents, your friends, that’s all we are, is a collection of intermingling ideas as a collective. ↗

— Matt Bellamy

#individual #life #possessions #change

Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my land ↗

— Sitting Bull

#earth #enclosure #genocide #greed #land