"Worldly possessions" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to his cynical, witty talk. At dusk we gathered round the fire, he and I and the two tawny setters, three of us on the rug, and he in his long, low chair, and talked of the old family, whose sons were all dead, and of the gay years when we had been in our glory. I thought we were very well off in worldly possessions as it was, but my dear old hero put such content to speedy flight with his tales of the days that were gone, when, to put implicit trust in him, a regal hospitality had filled the house with great and distinguished guests, glad ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that the Board of Home ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... choppers; nor do they lose their grade in society by such employment. After all, it is education and manners that must distinguish the gentleman in this country, seeing that the labouring man, if he is diligent and industrious, may soon become his equal in point of worldly possessions. The ignorant man, let him be ever so wealthy, can never be equal to the man of education. It is the mind that forms the distinction between the classes in this ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... imagination of Plato, [128] and which subsisted in some degree among the austere sect of the Essenians, [129] was adopted for a short time in the primitive church. The fervor of the first proselytes prompted them to sell those worldly possessions, which they despised, to lay the price of them at the feet of the apostles, and to content themselves with receiving an equal share out of the general distribution. [130] The progress of the Christian religion relaxed, and gradually abolished, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... designed returning to it, Mr. Ford troubled no more about him. So his nephew thanked the Registrar right heartily for all the goodness he had displayed in helping two people through the great crisis of their lives, and went on his way. His worldly possessions were represented by a new suit of blue serge which he wore, and a few trifles in a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... those devoted priests who, abandoning home and family ties, annually go forth to preach the Gospel in foreign lands. Their worldly possessions are often confined to a few books of devotion and their ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... of love which commonly passes for all—the passion; but he lacked the additional incentives which nerve the common man to face that fear which seems well-nigh as universal as the fear of death, I mean the fear of marriage—life's two fears: that is, he had no desire to increase his worldly possessions by annexing a dowry, or ambition of settling down and procuring a wife as part of his establishment. After all, how full of bachelors the world would be if it were not for these motives: for the one other motive to a true marriage, the other half of love, however one names it, is it not a ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... distant, and should the scout be tracked, it would be hard to get away over this open space, unless he had warning of the approach of his pursuers. The woman thought of this, and sent up the road, on a mule, her whole worldly possessions, an old negro, dark as the night, but faithful as the sun in the heavens. It was high noon when the mule came back, his heels striking fire, and his rider's eyes flashing, as if ignited from the sparks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... It was as if he were friends with a whole world, lacking the social distinctions which only begin when someone acquires sufficient worldly possessions to give exclusive, formal dinners. He knew every passer-by well enough to address him or her by the Christian name. Women called to him from porches with a dozen invitations ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... and the noble simplicity of his life found its most eloquent evidence at his death in the discovery that his entire worldly possessions ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... steamers, which ply between Sydney, Geelong, and Melbourne, stop. Our traps did not amount to much, as we had no money to spare for freighting, and when we first stepped upon the soil of Australia, our worldly possessions consisted of four shirts, do. pants, two pairs of boots, blankets, tents, &c., the whole weighing just one hundred and fifty pounds—not a large amount, but sufficient for two men, whose ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... for the life of him, imagine why anyone would want specially to ransack his of all the choice of rooms at Mrs. Clunie's. He had nothing worth stealing, while many of his landlady's boarders were fairly well endowed in the matter of worldly possessions. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... seven-year-old boy sat beside her. To increase the income some English ale was brewed. The lad grew up with an aversion to making beer, and when fourteen, his father insisting that he should enter the business, his mother helped him to run away. Tying all his worldly possessions, a shirt and pair of stockings, in a cotton handkerchief, the mother and her boy walked eight miles below Poughkeepsie, when, giving him all the money she had, seventy-five cents, she kissed him, and with tears in her eyes saw him cross the ferry and land safely on the other ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... middle of the night she called to them, as she stole silently out of the house, that for their kindness she left them all the worldly possessions she had, namely her white cow. This they were in no wise grateful for, because they could scarcely afford to feed it and it was too poor to sell or to hope to draw ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... last two or three years, and which I am very much afraid will pay no dividend, or much smaller ones, after two or three years to come. With that exception the house where I live, with its contents, with about four acres of land, constitute my whole worldly possessions, except two or three vacant lots, which would not bring me $5,000 all told. I could not sell them now for enough to pay my debts. I have been in my day an extravagant collector of books, and have a library which you would like to ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... salesman, for the past nine years he has drifted from one position to another. As he says himself, he lost ambition after he decided not to get married, and concluded he would not attempt to gain worldly possessions, but merely enough to subsist on. His early life showed not so much tendency towards elation and depression as towards imaginative thinking with a leaning towards day-dreaming and "mysteries." Of late years his reading has been confined to sexual topics, as discussed by various ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of breaking the engagement which he had made. He went to his room, made a bundle of his worldly possessions, and crept out of the back door, down the road to ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... capital; my adversary a relation of the king's. I offered a large sum for my release; but when they found out that I was wealthy, they rejected, as I increased, my offers, until I was compelled to sacrifice one half of my worldly possessions to escape from the severity of the Star Chamber. But the loss of property was nothing; I had still more than enough: it was the dreadful length of my confinement, during which anxiety had swelled hours into days, and days into ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was one of the recurring phrases. He applied it to Philip Lambert, applied it sadly to himself and with a shake of his head to his daughter, Carlotta. He remembered too the story of the rich young man. Had he made Carlotta as the rich young man, cumbered her with so many worldly possessions and standards that by his own hand he was keeping her out of the heaven of happiness she might have ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... named by the novelist because, as the famous writer explained, "that ancient multi-millionaire, you know, really was an ass"—was to be entrusted with all the available worldly possessions of the little party. An arrangement—the more experienced man carefully pointed out—that, considering the chief characteristics of Croesus, was quite in accord with the customs of modern pilgrimages. Conrad Lagrange, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... nothing," he answered, "though if there were I know you would do it gladly and entirely. I have bestowed all my worldly possessions on the one man besides yourself to whom I owe a debt of gratitude—John Westonhaugh. Had I known you less well, I would have made you a sharer in my forsaken wealth. Only this I beg of you. Take this gem and keep it always for my sake. No—do not look at it in that way. Do not consider ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... purposes) is worse than the second. And as (a small portion of) fire thrust into the hollow of a tree consumeth the tree itself to its roots, even so affection, ever so little, destroyeth both virtue and profit. He cannot be regarded to have renounced the world who hath merely withdrawn from worldly possessions. He, however, who though in actual contact with the world regardeth its faults, may be said to have truly renounced the world. Freed from every evil passion, soul dependent on nothing with such a one hath truly renounced the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... although he already had one in London. "The Queen," said my daughter, "should celebrate her Jubilee by giving good gifts to her subjects, and not by filching from the poor their pennies. To give half her worldly possessions to her impoverished people, to give Home Rule to Ireland, or to make her public schools free, would be deeds worthy her Jubilee; but to take another cent from those who are hopelessly poor is a sin against suffering humanity." The young woman realized the situation and said: "I shall ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... of peaked," said Sarah. But neither of them dreamed of the true state of affairs: how poor Sylvia Crane, half-starved and half-frozen in heart and stomach, was on the verge of bankruptcy of all her little worldly possessions. ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... means which, before, we considered so important to the gratification of our pride and our ambition. Not that we have lost either our pride or our ambition, but they have become centred in other objects dearer to us than ourselves—in the race springing up—to whom we shall leave our names and worldly possessions when our own ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... dollars, and pull down the great fabric of a rich man's fortune? Thy power I now invoke, thou little minister of vengeance; for I hate the aristocrat who expressed his regret at my escape, because, forsooth! my services were valuable to him!—and now, as the flames of fire consume his worldly possessions, so may the flames of eternal ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... layman of gentle blood and of knightly rank. All these had surrendered their claim to everything in the shape of property, and had resolved to follow their great leader's example by stripping themselves of all worldly possessions, and suffering the loss of all things. They were beggars—literally barefooted beggars. The love of money was the root of all evil. They would not touch the accursed thing lest they should be defiled—no, not with the tips of their fingers. "Ye cannot serve ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the day, for the most part, alone in her room and thinking of her father. Her bedroom, an attic with a sloping roof, contained all her worldly possessions. In part because she had always been so reserved a child, in part because there had been no one in whom she might confide even had she wished it, she had always placed an intensity of feeling around and about the few things that were hers. Her library ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... that set the divine blessing of love (I am transposing from the manuscript) high above all earthly gifts and honours, and listed it in the catalogue of heaven's choicest rewards. Slayton's literary ambition was intense. He would have sacrificed all other worldly possessions to have gained fame in his chosen art. He would almost have cut off his right hand, or have offered himself to the knife of the appendicitis fancier to have realized his dream of seeing one of his efforts published in ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry |
