Quotes About Detachment

He didn't exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. "He was your enemy, and now he is dead," he said. "This is cause for rejoicing." "Not exactly," I said. I didn't know how to explain. "You're a Christian," he said, as if he'd discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian. "I'm a real bad one," I said hurriedly. His lips compressed, and I could see he was trying hard not to laugh.

that belonged in the big pile of things that weren't my problem.

Whatever's in front of you, you do the best you can and let it land where it lands, and then you walk away.

I think once you've finished a movie you really have to detach from it so that you can come back and watch it as an audience member.

I don't keep a lot of memorabilia around.

I don't hoard things and I don't cling to memories.

I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism.

I'm very much in a mindset that I take myself out of anything that I'm not involved in.

The film industry does not interest me greatly. The people, I don't mingle with them much. I meet them when I have to.

Our tendency is to think that if we let go, we'll lose the things that make us happy. But the opposite is true. The more we let go, the happier we become.

Repeating a phrase like "Life is suffering" might help you notice when you are about to become attached to something, but it cannot help you understand the true nature of suffering or reveal the path shown to us by the Buddha.

If, in our heart, we still cling to anything — anger, anxiety, or possessions — we cannot be free.

La capacidad de encarnar el desapego y la ausencia de miedo es un regalo mucho más precioso que el dinero o las riquezas materiales.

Seen from across the street, he was like someone to whom the world had long since given notice to quit but who was compelled to stay in it, no longer belonging to it, but unable to leave it.

Then he had kept himself to himself, in the way you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it's a tree, and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.

Cultivate the art of renunciation.

How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?

Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it.

How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don't concern you!

Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace.

We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our own bosom.

Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment.

Concerning solitude: most of the accidents of community life need not seriously concern me—differences of opinion, other people's ideas of the spiritual life, the kind of organ music that seems to please many. Why should I bother about all that? It is none of my business.

We cannot possess things–we die and they are lost, or they are stolen, or they perish. But more than that, we ourselves cannot even enjoy the things themselves. To think we can is idolatry.