Quotes about possession

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“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

“A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.”

“It is not an act of bravery to try to save your own village. It is an instinct to protect what you possess. Bravery is when you step in to help when you have nothing to lose.”

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”

“At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.”

“All of us have darkness inside us, and at times it possesses and seduces us in ways we never thought possible.”

“It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”

“Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”

“Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.”

“When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.”

“He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”

“All men are equal - all men, that is, who possess umbrellas.”

“Beautiful women rarely possess sufficient depth of character to survive without their pretty feathers.”

“O what a blessed day that will be when I shall… stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains and sorrows, my fears and tears, and possess the glory which was the end of all!”

“There's no room for demons when you're self-possessed.”

“We demand that sex speak the truth […] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.”

“Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.”

“My sister, with her ratty red-highlighted hair and her linen pajamas and her combat boots—how could she possibly worry about being possessed by a goddess? What goddess would want her, except the goddess of chewing gum?”

“Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.”

“We all fail to appreciate each day just how much we already possess. Light, air, freedom, the companionship of friends.”

“She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.”

“Kate Daniels, trained negotiator. When in possession of some valuable information, give it away to the first sexy man you see with no guarantee of return.”

“Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.”

“Climb the day, Drop your dreams, Possess the day.”

“If she know how strongly he felt, she'd have run out the door. He wasn't used to the possessive, or the savage joy she brought to his heart. It ate at his control, so he turned his attention to the music. He understood music.”

“Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”

“For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.”

“I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.”

“How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”

“It is within our power not to make a judgement about something, and so not disturb our minds; for nothing in itself possesses the power to form our judgements.”

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”

“Nick‘s eyes widened as a total state of befuddled huh possessed him. Was he in the
Twilight Zone?”

“No one had ever said such things to her before. People were intimidated by her self-possession and no-nonsense demeanor. No man would ever dream of calling her adorable, sweet, darling… and certainly no one had ever made herthat way.”

“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”

“Who's possessing who now, Casper?”

“I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.”

“Many invest wisely in business matters, but fail to invest time and interest in their most valued possessions: their spouses and children.”

“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”

“We are the Edema Ruh, and the thing we value most every man possesses. You can tell us your story.”

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

“Would like to join me? (Astrid)
I think I’d look strange in a bikini. (Zarek)
Was that a joke? Can it be you made a real joke? (Astrid)
Yeah, I must be possessed or something. (Zarek)”

“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”

“Our weapon is our knowledge. But remember, it may be a knowledge we may not know that we possess.”

“For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it… We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.”

“I thought there was a good chance the fridge was possessed. It was subtle about it, but I had its number. I knew its ways. Oh yes.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an heir.”

“The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies”

“The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.”

“The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”

“We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.”

“[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.”

“Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!”

“Then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

“I can't imagine what possessed you to propose to me."
"Well that will give you something to puzzle over any time you can't sleep.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large ego must be in want of a woman to cut him down to size”

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.”

“You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasures, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed.”

“Love one another, but let’s try not to possess one another.”

“If love is like a possession, maybe my letter are like my exorcisms”

“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”

“If all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest”

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”

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

“Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if we first know where to look without flinching.”

“I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.”

“She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind”

“If a man can possess a woman sexually -really possess- he won't need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thirty-something woman in possession of a satisfying career and fabulous hairdo must be in want of very little”

“. The language of love is like that, possessive. That should be the first warning that it's not going to encourage anyone's betterment.”

“Youthfulness is not determined by age. It is determined by one's life force. One who possesses hope is forever young. One who continually advances is forever beautiful.”

“I saw that nothing was permanent. You don't want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it”

“It is because people live in the things they possess instead of in their relationship to God that God seems at times to be cruel.”

“I’ve told you before, I love like a madman,” he said. “Immoderate, jealous, possessive… I’m absolutely intolerable.”

“If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess”

“I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.”

“Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is.”

“Memories are nice little possessions. As long as you don't ignore the present when you take them out to play.”

“When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”

“My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.”

“She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.”

“Opinion is a fitting thing but truth outlasts the sun - if then we cannot own them both, possess the oldest one.”

“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”

“There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.”

“Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.”

“No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?… It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.”

“Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.”

“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.”

“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”

“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man”

“I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

“As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.”

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”

“Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.”

“Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

“Most dancers I know, especially the talented and successful ones, seem to possess [my dog's] knack for living moment to moment. You see, their idea of time is related to those infinitely short moments when they are onstage being their superselves.”

“His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.”

“Marriage… is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.”