One loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them.

Simplicity has the strongest power to possess, obsess and transgress.

Whether he lives a long time or a short time amounts to the same thing, for the present moment is of equal duration for everyone, and that is all any man possesses.

When we get a new idea - or remember an old one ? and we cling to it and try to spread it with evangelical zeal, then we no longer have control over it. In fact, it's the idea itself that possesses us and becomes our new master. And we end up blindly serving the idea and forgetting the cause that brought it to us in the first place.

Hyper focusing on physical possessions will not bring us happiness or satisfaction, nor will it ensure long-term financial gain.

What you have learned from experience is worth much more than gold. If you have a house it may burn down. Any kind of possession can be lost, but your experience is yours forever. Keep it and find a way to use it.

"Love is only a word, until we decide to let it possess us with all its force.

A mind possessed by unmade books.

"I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

Love does not claim materialistic possession of any kind, it yields complete freedom.

If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)-Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world-a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious-surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.

"You give but little when you give of your possessions.

He who has more money or possessions than you is not necessarily happier than you, happy more often than you, or happy like you.

A "life of value," as I see it, has two parts: The first is about one fulfilling oneself and finding meaning by prioritizing, or living the values that they authentically possess. When one's life is consistent with what they truly value, then life just "feels right." But beyond a more self-oriented approach to finding happiness and fulfillment, a good life is making positive differences to those in the family, the community, the country, and the world.

If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better-a knowledge of beauty; it's inflated value, it's inevitable loss.

Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities that we admire; and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind those qualities that first induced us to begin our courting.

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

There is no greater power than the one others do not believe you possess.

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else.