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1 " Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. "
― Daphne du Maurier , Rebecca
2 " Your spouse is not a possession you attain, but a friend in which you trust & adore. "
― Robert Vanleeuwen , Among Wolves'
3 " Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. "
― Arthur Conan Doyle , The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #3)
4 " Freedom is a possession of inestimable value. "
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
5 " Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself. "
― Robert Henri
6 " The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality. "
― Thomas Mann
7 " The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest, but if it is judged worthy by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.In fine I have written my work not as an essay with which to win the applause of the moment but as a possession for all time. "
― Thucydides , History of the Peloponnesian War
8 " Happiness is a perception—not a possession. "
9 " Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be. "
― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch
10 " He that cannot cast off a possession has become the possessed "
11 " When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. "
― John Maynard Keynes , Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
12 " But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. "
13 " I was a possession he had a right to use, a woman with no feelings that mattered.” Wedderburn still did not speak. “I don’t want to feel like that again,” she said in a whisper. Wedderburn’s eyes were dark with a violent emotion, but his hands were gentle as he held her face. “You’ll never be just any woman to me,” he said. “I want to know you, Alison Douglas. "
― Margaret Mallory , Captured by a Laird (The Douglas Legacy, #1)
14 " A friend is a possession we earn, not a gift. ....The Lord has declared that those who serve him and keep his commandments are called his servants. After they have been tested and tried and are found faithful and true in all things, they are called no longer servants, but friends. His friends are the ones he will take into his kingdom and with whom he will associate in an eternal inheritance. "
― Marvin J. Ashton
15 " Every life is a possession of faith and exercises an inevitable and silent propaganda. "
16 " An aspiration is a joy forever a possession as solid as a landed estate a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. "
17 " Happiness is not a possession to be prized it is a quality of thought a state of mind. "
18 " Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity. "