Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law, it's nine-tenths of the problem.
John Lennon
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Epicurus
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.
Henry David Thoreau
There’s enough on this planet for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed.
Mahatma Ghandi
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires — desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom
Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.
Buddha
Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder. If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth. The technique is to release. The Buddhist way of understanding is always letting go of our views and knowledge in order to transcend. This is the most important teaching. That is why I use the image of water to talk about understanding. Knowledge is solid; it blocks the way of understanding. Water can flow, can penetrate.
Thich Nhat Hanh, explaining the above quote from Buddha
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Benjamin Franklin
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
Ernest Hemingway
I'd put my money on solar energy… I hope
we don't have to wait til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
Thomas Edison, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, March 1931
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
— Dom Helder Camara