Indeed, whenever a new idea is developed, as for example ballooning, warfare immediately takes possession.
Fredrik Bajer

It is a principle of our nature that feelings once excited turn readily from the object by which they are excited to some other object which may for the time being take possession of the mind.
Matthew Simpson

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
Joyce Carol Oates

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
Carl Friedrich Gauss

It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.
Max Planck

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
John Locke

It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge; and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.
Henry James Sumner Maine

Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own.
Samuel Smiles

Knowledge is that possession that no misfortune can destroy, no authority can revoke, and no enemy can control. This makes knowledge the greatest of all freedoms.
Bryant H. McGill

Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
Hilaire Belloc

Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.
Rabindranath Tagore

Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible - it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.
Barbara de Angelis

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Thomas Carlyle

Man should not consider his material possession his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.
Saint Thomas Aquinas

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.
Andrea Dworkin

Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.
Vera Brittain

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.
Pearl S. Buck

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
Katherine Fullerton Gerould

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.
John Lennon