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    “We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it—and have it repeated to us—over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.”

    Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 124)

      “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”

      Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 42)

        “To feel sufficient, to be satisfied with what we have: Chisoku in Japanese. Of course, by some measures, there’s never enough. We can always come up with a reason why more is better, or better is better, or new is better or different is better. Enough becomes a choice, not a measure of science. The essence of choice is that it belongs to each of us. And if you decide you have enough, then you do. And with that choice comes a remarkable sort of freedom. The freedom to be still, to become aware and to stop hiding from the living that’s yet to be done.”

        Seth Godin, Blog

          “Remember how passionately you yearned in the past for many of the things which you hate or despise now. Remember how many things you lost trying to satisfy your former desires. The same thing could happen now, with the desires which excite you at present. Try to tame your present desires, calm them; this is most beneficial, and most achievable.”

          Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 49)

            “Markets often persuade us that we don’t have enough. Communities remind us that we do.”

            Seth Godin, Blog

              “We may claw and fight and work to own things, but those things can be taken away in a second. The same goes for other things we like to think are ‘ours’ but are equally precarious: our status, our physical health or strength, our relationships. How can these really be ours if something other than us—fate, bad luck, death, and so on—can dispossess us of them without notice? So what do we own? Just our lives—and not for long.”

              Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 360)

                “Meaning is not found in the material realm—dinner, jazz, cocktails, conversation or whatever. Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.”

                Howard, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 126)

                  “No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.”

                  Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 258)

                    “Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it’s no more than a gift on loan.”

                    John McGahern, The Leavetaking, via Sunbeams (Page 109)

                      “One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.”

                      Immanuel Kant, via Sunbeams (Page 103)

                        “The diseases of the rational soul are long-standing and hardened vices, such as greed and ambition—they have put the soul in a straitjacket and have begun to be permanent evils inside it. To put it briefly, this sickness is an unrelenting distortion of judgment, so things that are only mildly desirable are vigorously sought after.”

                        Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 93)

                          “The unrestricted person, who has in hand what they will in all events, is free. But anyone who can be restricted, coerced, or pushed into something against what they will is a slave.”

                          Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 81)

                            “Poverty is not the absence of goods, but rather the overabundance of desire.”

                            Plato, via Sunbeams (Page 53)

                              “Remember: even what we get for free has a cost, if only in what we pay to store it—in our garages and in our minds. As you walk past your possessions today, ask yourself: Do I need this? Is it superfluous? What’s this actually worth? What is it costing me?”

                              Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 75)

                                “‘Sought’ is from the verb to seek; I have always been looking for something. I see that now, for as long as I can recall I harboured fantasies of how some object or experience would heal me, would make me whole. Sometimes before Christmas I would be so euphoric at the prospect of the following day’s gifts that I’d vibrate until it felt like I might shape-shift. What was I imagining the millennium Falcon or whatever it was would bring? What was the inherent drive that was so fiercely engaged? I always felt these artefacts would bring completion. It was like I was born with the yearning to be whole and continually felt that each new object or encounter, particularly if enthusiastically heralded, would bring redemption.”

                                Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 194)