“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.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 208
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John Lancaster Spalding 202
Catholic bishop 1840–1916Related quotes

“Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.”
Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost

A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Context: Nevertheless, taking life as a whole, believing that it consists not in what we have, but in our power of enjoying the same; that there are in it things nobler and dearer than ease, plenty, or freedom from care — nay, even than existence itself; surely it is not Quixotism, but common-sense and Christianity, to protest that love is better than outside show, labour than indolence, virtue than mere respectability

Source: Quotes:, Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1909), p. 523

Harry Pepner, as quoted in Chicken Soup for the Soul : Stories for a Better World (2005) by Jack Canfield, p. 2
Misattributed

“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.

16 July 1848
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.
As translated in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries