Richard Foster Quotes

I felt I was owned by possessions.

Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

It's a law of life: the tyranny of things.

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.

All things that a man owns hold him far more than he holds them.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

The whole idea of the pursuit of goods and possessions has completely corrupted the human experience, along with religion, which I think limits the intellect.

Kids own nothing. Everything is either promised, borrowed, longed for or exaggerated.

This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.

Modern idols or false gods can take such forms as clothes, homes, businesses, machines, automobiles, pleasure boats, and numerous other material deflectors.

If money and material things become the center of our lives, they seize us and make us slaves.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

The whole problem with the world today: private property. If no one owned anything, it would be a lot better. There's even an entire industry devoted to keeping an eye on other people's stuff. This is how stupid it's got. If you decide to get rid of a lot of your stuff, you can give it to a thrift shop or to Goodwill.

You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

All of us experience the sad effects of blind submission to consumerism. In the first place it represents crass materialism. At the same time it represents a radical dissatisfaction because one quickly learns that the more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.

Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected.... Hoarding is idolatry.

Possession hinders enjoyment. It merely gives you the right to keep things for or from others, and thus you gain more enemies than friends.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital ... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

I want to feel that I own things.

Things own you. That's the trouble with capitalism. Things own you. With communism and fascism - ideas own you. One idea and you can't have any other.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going to give us real satisfaction.