How rich, how happy is he who lives in poverty! He lives his days in wisdom, and sleeps in peace. Only he can be really happy, only he is so always!
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard; to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.
You don't need money to be free. You can just say if you don't need stuff, you're always free.
I have the greatest of all riches: that of not desiring them.
Let your greatest possession be the ability to let go of any possession, joyfully.
The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter.
There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the [christian] life. Because it is so natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.
There seem to me a great many blessings which come from true poverty and I should be sorry to be deprived of them.
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
Some of the happiest people I know have none of the things the world insists are necessary for satisfaction and joy.
My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.
Give up, renounce the world. Now we are like dogs strayed into a kitchen and eating a piece of meat, looking round in fear lest at any moment some one may come and drive them out. Instead of that, be a king and know you own the world. This never comes until you give it up and it ceases to bind. Give up mentally, if you do not physically. Give up from the heart of your hearts
Thank God for poverty That makes and keeps us free And lets us go our unobtrusive way, Glad of the sun and rain, Upright, serene, humane, Contented with the fortune of a day.
But now I feel off the grid. I feel that I am not part of the culture. And because I don't have a car I don't really go anywhere to buy things. In fact, I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own.
Unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens. If you have them, you have to take care of them! There is great freedom in simplicity of living. It is those who have enough but not too much who are the happiest.
I have no desire for wealth or possessions, and so I have nothing. I do not experience the initial suffering of having to accumulate possessions, the intermediate suffering of having to guard and keep up possessions, nor the final suffering of loosing the possessions.
