“Material possessions in themselves are good. We would not survive for long without money, clothing, shelter and food. Yet if we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, we make of our possessions 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.”
2008, Disadvantaged Youth (18 July 2008)
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Pope Benedict XVI 117
265th Pope of the Catholic Church 1927Related quotes
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 208
In "My Country 'tis of Thee", ADAM International Review, No. 299 (1962)
Context: I am beginning to have a healthy dread of possessions, be it of a country, a house, a being or even an idea. If we are bothered by possessions we cannot really live either from without or from within; we are the possession of our possessions. All wars and most loves come from the possessive instinct. Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men: that you may belong to everything and everything be yours inclusive of yourself.
Could we, and we can, have the vital necessities for all, we should do away with this cry of class and begin to differentiate between individuals.
Individual superiority can alone feed the soul and give back through some materialisation of itself this individualised wealth of being.
[2012, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 65, 978-1-93659700-0]
Spiritual path, Virtue
“What we acquire with joy, we possess with indifference.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 202
“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
Variant: We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.
“Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.”
Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost
