Quotes About Detachment

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force.

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.

Men were looking at her, but with neither sympathy nor antipathy. Nor even with curiosity, she thought. They had the absorbed and vacant expression of the man who looks into his handkerchief after blowing his nose.

And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is bliss

I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them

When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.

America seemed insecure, violent, and wayward; and President Obama appeared detached and indecisive.

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory

No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.

Whenever a new situation presented itself, you had to remain cool and distant

In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love.

The Warrior knows that he is free to choose his desires, and he makes these decisions with courage, detachment and sometimes, with just a touch of madness

Look around. And don't get close to people who make you suffer.

You are free when you gain back yourself," Madame Wu said. "You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

Attachment," Buddha had said, "is the cause of grief.

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We're willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.'

One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Casteneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn't matter at all.

When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.

Every time we are willing to let the story line go, and every time we are willing to let go at the end of the out-breath, that's fundamentally renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away.