I present a collection of sentences, possess quotes and aphorisms on having and possessing.
Possess quotes and sayings
Table of Contents
possess quotes
Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have
(Oscar Wilde)
As foolish as we are, we want to conquer everything, as if we had time to own everything.
(Emperor Frederick II of Swabia)
We are born without taking anything, we die without taking anything away. And in between we fight to have something.
(N. Nur-ad-Din)
You can’t have it all. I mean, where would you put it?
(Steven Wright)
Life is not a having and a taking, but a being and a becoming.
(Mirna Loy)
This is mine, this is yours. Here is the beginning of the usurpation of the world.
(Blaise Pascal)
The things you once owned now own you.
(From the film Fight Club)
There is nothing wrong with people who have wealth. The mistake occurs when wealth takes possession of people.
(Billy Graham)
The atom is empty. This evidence should already teach us to attach less value to possessing things and to what is material.
(Fabrizio Caramagna)
Wealth does not consist in having great wealth, but in having few needs.
(Epictetus)
It’s not what you have, it’s what you use that makes the difference.
(Zig Ziglar)
Love does not possess,
nor would it like to be possessed,
since love is enough for love.
(Khalil Gibran)
I can’t have you but, since I love you, I can be you.
(Jacques Prévert)
Man does not know true joy because he always desires what he does not have.
(Bacchilide)
I prefer what I have to what I hope for
(Sant’Agostino)
Earning in what you have means losing in what you are.
(Lao Tzu)
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True perfection for man consists not in what he has, but in what he is.
(Oscar Wilde)
It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.
(Henry Ward Beecher)
Don’t ask me what I have, but what I am.
(Henrich Heine)
The wind says: today I have a hundred meadows of a hundred daisies, three peaks from which I gently sweep the snow, a bell tower and a dragon-shaped cloud that I walk around in the sky, who knows tomorrow. On the other hand, men want to possess things forever, and do not notice that the things possessed enter your soul and then make you burst.
(Fabrizio Caramagna)
I don’t have what I own, and I don’t even have what I do. I only have what I am.
(Anonymous)
Many men, like children, want to have something but not its consequences.
(José Ortega Y Gasset)
Let’s not be too demanding: it is better to have second choice diamonds than not to possess them at all.
(Mark Twain)
He who possesses much is not rich, but he who gives much.
(Erich Formm)
A friend is the best thing you can have, and the best thing you can be.
(Douglas Pagels)
You eternally love everything that you cannot have.
(Jules Renard)
Some things become so much ours that we forget them.
(Antonio Porchia)
Now is not the time to think about what you don’t have. Think about what you can do with what you have.
(Ernest Hemingway)
All our discontent with what we don’t have seemed to me to stem from ingratitude for what we have.
(Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe)
Those who have a lot are often greedy; those who have little always put that little in common.
(Odcar Wilde)
Anyone who has something he doesn’t use is a thief
(Mahatma Gandhi)
Nothing belonged to you, if not those few cubic centimeters that you had inside your skull.
(Goerge Orwell)
We have nothing in the world, because chance can take away everything except the power to say “I”.
(Simone Weil)
Why does the only thing we don’t always manage to ruin what we have?
(Carrie Bradshaw, in Sex and the City)
Each person has what they don’t want, and what others would like.
(Jerome K. Jerome)
The things worth having – the good, beautiful, honorable and noble things – are difficult to obtain.
(Cassandra Clare)
The secret of happiness is not in the possession of things, but in the enjoyment that one derives from them.
(Eugène Delacroix)
Love gives nothing but itself,
it takes nothing except itself.
Love does not possess,
nor would it like to be possessed,
since love is enough for love.
(Khalil Gibran)
What do you have of yourself in a wood? Your soul is in the leaves …
(Fabrizio Caramagna)
Each increased possession loads us with new tiredness.
(John Ruskin)
When possession of earthly things comes into play, men are unlikely to reason according to justice.
(Umberto Eco)
Health is the greatest possession.
Contentment is the greatest treasure.
Trust is the greatest friend
(Lao Tzu)
Possession is a form of avarice, and a miser cannot flourish. A miser is always in a state of spiritual constipation, he is sick. You have to open up, share. Share what you have and it will grow; share more and it will grow. Keep giving, and you will still receive. The source is eternal, don’t be stingy. Whatever it is – love, wisdom … anything, share. Non possessiveness means sharing.
(Osho)
Don’t worry if your horse runs away. If it belongs to you it will come back. And if he doesn’t come back, it’s because it was never yours.
(Chinese proverb)
Whoever happens to be in possession of a large sum of money will either be very happy or very unhappy.
(Chinese proverb)
Rich is not he who possesses, but he who gives, he who is capable of giving.
(Pope John Paul II)
Happiness is not so much in having as in sharing. We live with what we take, but we make a living with what we give.
(Winston Churchill)
The less one is, the less one expresses one’s life; the more one has, the more alienated one’s life is.
(Karl Marx)
The best life is one in which creative impulses play the majority and possessive impulses the smallest.
(Bertrand Russel)
To have little is to possess. To have so much is to be perplexed.
(Lao Tzu)
To possess means to depend on something and someone.
(Dacia Maraini)
A man cannot possess more than his heart can love.
(From the film Siberian education)
We only have what we know we have to lose, what we want to lose.
(Ursula Kroeber Le Gun)
Owning an asset is useless if you are not ready to lose it. And the goods whose loss is more easily tolerated are those which, lost, cannot be subject to regret.
(Seneca)
He is not happy with what luck cannot give more, but with whom he cannot take anything away.
(Francisco De Quevedo)
Each man can tell how many geese or how many sheep he has, but not how many friends.
(Guide)
You try to possess, and the more you try, the more love turns out to be something impossible, and the more the other starts to move away from you. The less you own, the closer you feel to each other. And if you don’t own at all, if freedom flows between lovers, you have great love
(Osho)
Everyone in life has the same amount of ice; but the rich in summer and the poor in winter.
(Anonymous)
Man is not the sum of what he has, but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
possess quotes by (Jean Paul Sartre)
Love to love, not to have something in return, otherwise it is not love.
(Leo Buscaglia)
Don’t ruin what you have by wishing for what you don’t have. Remember that what you now have was once among the things you hoped to have.
(Epicurus)
I am rich in the goods I have done without.
(Etienne Vigée)
Who is not satisfied with what he has, would not be satisfied even if he had what he wants
(Bertold Auerbach)
You will never be worthy of happiness, as long as you possess something, until your hatred of the rich only proves the desire to be rich in their place.
(Emile Zola)
You have as much as you hope. Hope a lot, you will have a lot.
possess quotes by (Father Pio)
To have seen a lot and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.
(William Shakespeare)
Well-being is not for those who own it, but for those who enjoy it.
(Benjamin Franklin)
You can have everything you want if you abandon the belief that you cannot have it.
(Robert Anthony Robbins)
Desire makes everything bloom; possession makes everything worn out and faded.
possess quotes by (Marcel Proust)
Whoever owns the most should fear not to lose.
(Leonardo da Vinci)
It is much better to wish than to have … The moment of desire, when you know that something is about to happen – it is the most exciting.
(Anonymous)
Happiness is better to imagine it than to possess it.
possess quotes by (Jacinto Benavente)
A rarely owned object retains the same charm it had when purchased.
(Pliny the Younger)
We only love what we pursue something inaccessible, what we don’t have.
(Marcel Proust)
If you want to get something from a woman, ask her everything. If you want to have everything, don’t give her anything.
(Roberto Gervaso)
The property has force for its unique and glorious origin: it is born and conserved by force, and only gives in to a greater force.
possess quotes by (Anatole France)
Communism doesn’t work because people love to own things.
(Frank Zappa)
As long as everyone aspires to have more, classes will only be formed, there will only be class clashes and, in global terms, international wars. Greed and peace are mutually exclusive
(Erich Fromm)
Bolshevik: a man who has nothing and wants to share it with others.
(John Garland Pollard)
This is an injustice from God, that after having worn out your life to buy stuff, when you get it, you still want it, you have to leave it!
(Giovanni Verga)
Owning means waving it to the four winds, calling people together to see and admire it until your eyes come out of your head.
(Ryszard Kapuscinski)
There are only two classes of men in the world: those who have and those who earn. The former go to bed, the others fidget.
possess quotes by (Alfred De Vigny)
It would seem that having is a normal function of our existence, in the sense that, to live, we must have objects. Furthermore, we must have things in order to enjoy them. In a culture in which the supreme goal is to have – and indeed to have more and more – and in which it is possible to speak of someone as a person who “is worth a million dollars”, as there can be an alternative between having and to be? On the contrary, one would say that the true essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, it is nothing.
possess quotes by (Erich Fromm, To have and to be)
Yet, the great Masters of Life have made aut-aut its own between having and being the central nucleus of their respective systems. The Buddha teaches that, to reach the supreme stage of human development, we must not aspire to possessions. And Jesus: «Because whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for me will save it. In fact, what good is it for man to have gained the whole world if he has lost or ruined himself? ” (Luke, IX, 24-25). Master Eckhart5 taught that having nothing and making oneself open and “empty”, that is, making sure that one’s self does not obstruct the path, constitutes the condition for achieving spiritual wealth and strength. Marx said that luxury is a vice just like poverty and that we should propose to be a goal, not to have much.
(Erich Fromm, To have and to be)
Since the society in which we live is dedicated to the acquisition of property and profit, we rarely find manifestations of the existential mode of being there, and most of us consider the mode of having as the most natural, rather the only acceptable lifestyle; all this has the consequence that it is particularly difficult for people to understand the characteristic of the mode of being, and even to understand that having is only one of the possible addresses.
(Erich Fromm, To have and to be)
For those who believe that having is an absolutely natural category of human existence, it may be surprising to learn that many languages do not have a term equivalent to “to have.” So for example, in Hebrew “I have” must be expressed by the indirect form jesh li (“it’s me”, it’s mine). Indeed, the languages in which possession is expressed in this form rather than with “I have” are the majority
(Erich Fromm, Having and being)
It is sad to have without being, but how difficult it is to be without having.
possess quotes by (Roberto Gervaso)
1990) To have or to be?
2015) Show off having or show off being?
(Exercise, Twitter)
Can you ask me what is the right measure of wealth? First have what you need, second enough.
(Seneca)
Go on in life with what you have. You make a living with what you give.
(Winston Churchill)
As long as he is there, it doesn’t matter that he is mine, just like the big trees in the parks, in whose shadow everyone rests and belongs to nobody.
(Banana Yoshimoto)
Sometimes we really understand what we want only when we can no longer have it.
(Anonymous)
To have something you’ve never had you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.
(Thomas Jefferson)
If nothing belongs to me, then I absolutely must not waste time worrying about things that are not mine. Better to live as if today were the first (or last) day of life.
(Paulo Coelho)
In life you must always be like on this ship: passengers. You don’t have to own anything!
(Tiziano Terzani)
Everything is vanity, vanity is to desire, to possess is vanity
(José Saramago)
There is only one way to own everything: don’t want anything.
possess quotes by (EM Cioran)
Not resisting, not judging and not having attachment are the three aspects of true freedom and an enlightened life.
(Eckart Tolle)
**
Proverbs
Who has never had an exhibition more than necessary.
Who does not have, needs who has and who has, needs who does not have.
Better to have than to have.
What cannot be obtained is longed for.
What you have you despise and what you don’t have you want.
Live on what you have and not what you wait for.
The things possessed are in small value.