Possession

If you own something you cannot give away, then you don't own it, it owns you.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

No one possesses unalloyed pleasure; there is some anxiety mingled with the joy

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled

Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?

The agitator seizes the world. The artist is seized by it

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of truth

If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.