“What we acquire with joy, we possess with indifference.”

“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.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

“Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

“What we enjoy, not what we possess, is ours, and in labouring for the possession of many things, we lose the power to enjoy the best.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

“What we possess has its intrinsic value, but how we came to possess it is also an important question.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

“What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

“Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist