If you want something, wait awhile. Chances are the feeling will pass.

— Ann Patchett, My Year of No Shopping

“If it’s not something you’d pay full price for, don’t buy it on sale.”

— Elizabeth Dunkel

There are times when it’s clear to me that by getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and times when, say, the apricot velvet headboard against the lavender wall of a room in an old hotel fills me with a mysterious satisfied pleasure in harmonies of color, texture, atmospheres of comfort, domesticity and a desire to go on living among such color and texture and space and general real estate. There are times when I believe in spiritual detachment, though there was a recent occasion when I bothered to go take a picture of my old reading armchair to the upholsterer’s around the corner to see if it can be made beautiful again and worry about whether charcoal velveteen would go with my next decor. There are times when I enjoy the weightlessness of traveling and wish to own nothing and afternoons when I want to claim every farmhouse I drive by as my own, especially those with porches and dormers, those spaces so elegantly negotiating inside and out, as though building itself could direct and support an ideal life, the life we dream of when we look at houses.

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit

“In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption.”

― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

For, as I always like to say: ‘It is not possessing something that is harmful, but being attached to it.’

—Abba Zosimas
In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

“Everyone is attempting to buy what no one can sell.”

—Joshua Fields Millburn, Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

—Epicurus