covets QUOTES

1 " Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some " thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only " strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes " a believer." Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of " freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called " the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence. "

2 " For how long will insult hurt a person? For as long as he covets self-importance. For as long as one covets temporary [non eternal] things "

― Dada Bhagwan

3 " For how long will insult hurt a person? For as long as he covets self-importance. For as long as one covets temporary [non eternal] things. "

― Dada Bhagwan

4 " There's the good girl leading a charmed life who secretly covets to be the rare and elusive femme fatale and the femme fatale who yearns to be good and then there is their nemesis - men who dream and desire both. "

― Donna Lynn Hope

5 " There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets `things' with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns `my' and `mine' look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution. "

― A.W. Tozer , The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

6 " Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question. "

― A.E. Samaan

7 " It is a great wonder
How Almighty God in his magnificence
Favors our race with rank and scope
And the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.
Sometimes He allows the mind of a man
Of distinguished birth to follow its bent,
Grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth
And forts to command in his own country.
He permits him to lord it in many lands
Until the man in his unthinkingness
Forgets that it will ever end for him.
He indulges his desires; illness and old age
Mean nothing to him; his mind is untroubled
By envy or malice or thought of enemies
With their hate-honed swords. The whole world
Conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst
Until an element of overweening
Enters him and takes hold
While the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses,
Grown too distracted. A killer stalks him,
An archer who draws a deadly bow.
And then the man is hit in the heart,
The arrow flies beneath his defenses,
The devious promptings of the demon start.
His old possessions seem paltry to him now.
He covets and resents; dishonors custom
And bestows no gold; and because of good things
That the Heavenly powers gave him in the past
He ignores the shape of things to come.
Then finally the end arrives
When the body he was lent collapses and falls
Prey to its death; ancestral possessions
And the goods he hoarded and inherited by another
Who lets them go with a liberal hand.

“O flower of warriors, beware of that trap.
Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,
Eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
But it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
Illness or the sword to lay you low,
Or a sudden fire or surge of water
Or jabbing blade or javelin from the air
Or repellent age. Your piercing eye
Will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
Dear warrior, to sweep you away. "

― Seamus Heaney

8 " Hoarding can never end, for the heart of man always covets for more, its raging appetites can only be quenched by the heavy sands of the grave. "

― Bangambiki Habyarimana , Book of Wisdom

9 " Who covets more is evermore a slave. "

10 " He is not rich that possesses much but he that covets no more and he is not poor that enjoys little but he that wants too much. "