Quotes About Detachment

External detachment is often an actual indication of a secret, growing, inner attachment to the things we stay away from externally.

Happy the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying, once and for all.

Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.

True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment,

The root of faults is nothing other than your ego-clinging, the attitude of deluded fixation, so cut the ties of ego-clinging! Cast away the fixation on enemy and friend! Forsake worldly concerns! Abandon materialistic pursuits! Engage in nothing but the Dharma from the core of your heart! Just as a seedling doesn't grow on a stone, there will be no enhancement without removing the fault of ego-clinging. You should therefore abandon the root of all evils, ego-clinging. (p. 90)

It is entirely possible that you will feel attachment to or aversion for certain sense objects. Give that up. When you feel attachment towards something attractive or aversion towards something repulsive, understand that to be your mind's delusion, nothing but a magical illusion.

Tsogyal, if you want to practice the Dharma in an authentic way, it is most important to cut your ties to unwholesome places, companions, and so forth. So give them up!

freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

He went to the window and glanced down at the traffic eight stories below...From so high up it all seemed fluid and impersonal, as though a mass of detritus were being swept away by water. That was all you really had to do to determine people's destiny: rise high enough to alter your view, making it divine.

The trick to staying out of trouble is to keep your nose out of other people's business.

People I cared about could hurt my feels, but almost complete strangers? I could care less what they thought.

the truth in regards to studying abroad] "you know what else is nice about being a foreigner? Whatever you do takes place in a capsule that need not be discovered and opened by someone back home. Nothing really counts--it was the life that falls in the forest. That's how I looked at it. I felt free to...oh, I don't know.

I believe it is the inability of beginning writers to achieve at least a certain degree of detachment from their writing that defeats so many of them before they even get started. Without this distancing, any criticism of your writing will seem devastating, even incapacitating, whereas with the proper amount of detachment it will seem merely cruel and unusual punishment.

We coexisted in a state of mutual detachment.

We live at the mercy of certain silences. We have all known things about each other for a long time. So we try to avoid each other. It would be for the best, of course, if none of us were ever to see each other again.

For such a brainy guy, Richard was able to sustain an impressive degree of emotional and cognitive detachment from reality.

There was a cat, and they ignored each other.

Ignore the world and trust it to return the favor.

He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!

ever farther from human beings, driving him on ever more insistently toward the magnetic pole of the greatest possible solitude.

aquel sentimiento que suele calificarse de tolerancia: una tibia mezcla de asco, desprecio y compasión. El hombre ya no le conmo?vía. Le resultaba indiferente.

Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings.

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

Ten presente el ejemplo de una vaca vieja, que se da por satisfecha durmiendo en un cobertizo. Tienes que comer, dormir y cagar, eso es inevitable, lo demás no es asunto tuyo.