“Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.”

“Beauty is also a Gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.”

“Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.”

“Obsessing about things isn’t good for you. It’s a form of possessing things and at some level of awareness; we possess nothing. That’s how we get free of being possessed by our possessions.”

“We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.”

“We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to "patch up" our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being.”