Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter IV, Part 9, The Grand Dynamic of History, p. 209
Context: In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have.
“If we are bothered by possessions we cannot really live either from without or from within; we are the possession of our possessions.”
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.
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Natalie Clifford Barney 8
writer and salonist 1876–1972Related quotes
“Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.”
Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 208
“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.
The Gay Science (1882)
[2005, The Transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom, 109, 978-0-94153219-8]
Spiritual path, Wisdom