Quotes about possession
page 7

Paulo Coelho photo

“An appreciation for high fashion does not preclude possession of common sense.”

Tasha Alexander (1969) American writer

Source: Tears of Pearl

Sylvia Day photo

“If I owned Gideon, he possessed me. I couldn’t imagine belonging to anyone else.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Entwined with You

Victor Hugo photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
Walter Scott photo

“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Sir Walter Scott Collection Guy Mannering. Chap. xxxvii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Anaïs Nin photo
Diana Gabaldon photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Samuel Adams photo

“If ever the Time should come, when vain & aspiring Men shall possess the highest Seats in Government, our Country will stand in Need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its Ruin.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Letter to James Warren (24 October 1780) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2094

Leo Tolstoy photo
Sylvia Day photo
David Sedaris photo
E.M. Forster photo
Agatha Christie photo
Anne Sexton photo
Jane Austen photo
Ayn Rand photo

“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: The Journals of Ayn Rand

Alan Paton photo
Peace Pilgrim photo
Anaïs Nin photo
Georgette Heyer photo
Kelley Armstrong photo
Peace Pilgrim photo
Henri Bergson photo
Alexandre Dumas photo
Sarah Vowell photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Daniel McCallum photo

“It is very important, that principal officers should be in full possession of all information necessary to enable them to judge correctly as to the industry and efficiency of subordinates of every grade.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 40-41: Cited in Chandler (1977, p. 103)

Mani Madhava Chakyar photo

“Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam…. India too suffered terribly as thousands of Hindu temples and sacred edifices disappeared in northern India by the time of Sikandar Lodi and Babur. Will Durant rightly laments in the Story of Civilization that "We can never know from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty it once possessed". In Delhi, after the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the materials of which were utilized to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam masjid, it was after 700 years that the Birla Mandir could be constructed in 1930s. Sita Ram Goel has brought out two excellent volumes on Hindu Temples: What happened to them. These informative volumes give a list of Hindu shrines and their history of destruction in the medieval period on the basis of Muslim evidence itself. This of course does not cover all the shrines razed. Muslims broke temples recklessly. Those held in special veneration by Hindus like the ones at Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, were special targets of Muslims, and whenever the Hindus could manage to rebuild their shrines at these places, they were again destroyed by Muslim rulers. From the time of Mahmud of Ghazni who destroyed the temples at Somnath and Mathura to Babur who struck at Ayodhya to Aurangzeb who razed the temples at Kashi Mathura and Somnath, the story is repeated again and again.”

Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Yehuda Ashlag photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
John Updike photo

“For me, I have seen worlds and people begin and end, actually and metaphorically, and it will always be the same. It’s always fire and water.
No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you’re an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. Whatever you know about their true natures is rafted on top of that. So, when it comes to the day-to-day sensations of living, from mixing a cup of coffee to flying a kite, you treat with the four ideal elements of the old philosophers: earth, air, fire, water.
Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored. Earth? The trouble with earth is that it endures. Solid objects tend to persist with a monotonous regularity.
Not so fire and water, however. They’re formless, colorful, and they’re always doing something. While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out. It is coincidence that we’ve filled hells with fires and oceans with monsters? I don’t think so. Both principles are mobile, which is generally a sign of life. Both are mysterious and possess the power to hurt or kill. It is no wonder that intelligent creatures the universe over have reacted to them in a similar fashion. It is the alchemical response.”

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 6 (pp. 137-138)

Harry V. Jaffa photo
Edmund White photo
Murasaki Shikibu photo

“To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do: whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?”

trans. Richard Bowring
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo
Marie François Xavier Bichat photo

“One might almost say that the plant is the framework, the foundation of the animal, and that to form the animal it sufficed to cover this foundation with a system of organs fitted to establish relations consists forms with the world outside. It follows of the succession substance of the animal form two quite distinct classes. One class in a continual into its own assimilation molecules that the functions and of excretion; through these functions the animal incessantly transsurrounding bodies, later to reject these molecules when they have become heterogeneous to it. Through this first class of functions the animal exists only within itself; through the other class it exists outside; it is an inhabitant of the world, and not, like the plant, of the place which saw its birth. The animal feels and perceives its surroundings, reflects its sensations, moves of its own will under their influence, and, as a rule, can communicate by its voice its desires and its fears, its pleasures or its pains. I call organic life the sum of the functions of the former class, for all organised creatures, plants or animals, possess them to a more or less marked degree, and organised structure is the sole condition necessary to their exercise. The combined functions of the second class form the ' animal' life named because it is the exclusive attribute of the animal kingdom.”

Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) French anatomist and physiologist

Original: (fr) On dirait que le végétal est l'ébauche, le canevas de l'animal, et que, pour former ce dernier, il n'a fallu que revêtir ce canevas d'un appareil d'organes extérieurs, propres à établir des relations. Il résulte de là que les fonctions de l'animal forment deux classes très-distinctes. Les unes se composent d'une succession habituelle d'assimilation et d'excrétion ; par elles il transforme sans cesse en sa propre substance les molécules des corps voisins, et rejette ensuite ces molécules, lorsqu'elles lui sont devenues hétérogènes. Il ne vit qu'en lui, par cette classe de fonctions ; par l'autre il existe hors de lui : il est l'habitant du monde, et non, comme le végétal, du lieu qui le vit naître. Il sent et aperçoit ce qui l'entoure, réfléchit ses sensations, se meut volontairement d'après leur influenc, et le plus souvent peut communiquer par la voix, ses désirs et ses craintes, ses plaisirs ou ses peines. J'appelle vie organique l'ensemble des fonctions de la première classe, parce que tous les êtres organisés, végétaux ou animaux, en jouissent à un degré plus ou moins marqué, et que la texture organique est la seule condition nécessaire à son exercice. Les fonctions réunies de la seconde classe forment la vie animale, ainsi nommée, parce qu'elle est l'attribut exclusif du règne animal. Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort (1800) Translation: [Russell, E. S., Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology, 1916, London, 28,

https://archive.org/details/formfunctioncont00russ/page/n5/mode/2up]

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Xavier Bichat / Quotes

Confucius photo
Mohammad Ali Foroughi photo
James Allen photo
George Meredith photo

“In…the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Source: The Egoist http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/egost11.txt (1879), Ch. 14.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky photo
Gregor Strasser photo
Adam Smith photo
Jacques Derrida photo
Gustav Radbruch photo
Sri Chinmoy photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the slate; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1813/mar/01/mr-grattans-motion-for-a-committee-on in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (1 March 1813).
1810s

L. Frank Baum photo
Alain Badiou photo
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it.”

Bk. 8, ch. 2, as translated by Isabel Hill (1833)
Variant translation: It is certainly through love that eternity can be understood; it confuses all thoughts about time; it destroys the ideas of beginning and end; one thinks one has always been in love with the person one loves, so difficult is it to conceive that one could live without him.
As translated by Sylvia Raphael (1998)
Corinne (1807)

William Hazlitt photo

“Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope; and few are reduced so low as that.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 34
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Angela of Foligno photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Joseph Story photo
Justin Martyr photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo
John Milton photo

“Madam, methinks I see him living yet;
So well your words his noble virtues praise,
That all both judge you to relate them true,
And to possess them, honour'd Margaret.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

To the Lady Margaret Ley http://www.bartleby.com/106/85.html

David Morrison photo
Perry Anderson photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo

“Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity; — all but the possibility of improvement.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

"The Vocation of the Scholar" (1794), as translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
The Vocation of the Scholar (1794)

H.L. Mencken photo

“The American people were possessed by the capitalist spirit without ever having had a bourgeoisie; French political society, in contrast, created a bourgeoisie devoid of the capitalist spirit.”

François Furet (1927–1997) French historian

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 7

African Spir photo
Thomas Henry Huxley photo
Nigel Cumberland photo

“Knowing ourselves is one of the most important skills that we must possess if we hope to improve how we work and interact with others.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Source: Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Managing Teams in a Week (2013) https://books.google.ae/books?idqZjO9_ov74EC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIIDAB#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Secrets of Success at Work – 50 techniques to excel (2014) https://books.google.ae/books?id4S7vAgAAQBAJ&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIJjAC#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, p.6

Calvin Coolidge photo

“Chan’s heart knew only greed, but there was within him enough intelligence to wonder before a man who could see all the uselessness of life, and still exult in the possessing of it.”

Lin Carter (1930–1988) American fantasy writer, editor, critic

Source: Tower at the Edge of Time (1968), Chapter 13, “The Scarlet Tower” (p. 125)

George Gordon Byron photo

“I die — but first I have possessed,
And come what may, I have been blessed.”

Source: The Giaour (1813), Line 1114.

Persius photo

“Is all your knowledge to go so utterly for nothing unless other people know that you possess it?”
Usque adeone<br/>scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Usque adeone
scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?
Satire I, line 26.
The Satires

Jane Addams photo
Rudyard Kipling photo

“Now I possess and am possessed of the land where I would be,
And the curve of half Earth's generous breast shall soothe and ravish me!”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Prairie http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p2/prairie.html, Stanza 5.
Other works

“He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness… He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Vale, Peter Cook' ( The Pembroke College, Cambridge, Society Annuel Gazette http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/odds+ends/petercook.html, September 1995)
Essays and reviews

François de La Rochefoucauld photo
Confucius photo
Herbert A. Simon photo
E.E. Cummings photo
Hayley Williams photo
Charles Baudelaire photo

“It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one’s eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

C'est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie, par et à travers la musique, que l'âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau; et, quand un poème exquis amène les larmes au bord des yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d'un excès de jouissance, elles sont bien plutôt le témoignage d'une mélancolie irritée, d'une postulation des nerfs, d'une nature exilée dans l'imparfait et qui voudrait s'emparer immédiatement, sur cette terre même, d'un paradis révélé.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV
L'art romantique (1869)

Georges Seurat photo

“Rood was in my possession the day after the appearance of Philippe Gille's book review, published by 'Le Figaro', 1881 (change of palette). I abandon earth colors from [18]82 to 1884. On Pissarro's advice I stop using emerald green”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

1885
Rood etait en ma possession le lendemain du jour oil paru la revue biblio graphique de Philippe Gille, collection du Figaro 1881 [changement de palette]. J'abandonne les terres en 82 a 1884. Sur le conseil de Pissarro je lache le verr emeraud (1885
Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Félix Fénéon', June 1890

Paul Klee photo
Richard Cobden photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Georg Simmel photo