Best 145 quotes in «detachment quotes» category

I am in myself so little that what they do with me scarcely interests me.

If I don't see the reason of someone being my friend, chances are, we are just floating and I need a ship to set sail.

If all emotions are common coin, then what is unique to the good man? To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of false beliefs. Instead, to preserve it faithfully, by calmly obeying God – saying nothing untrue, doing nothing unjust. And if the others don’t acknowledge it – this life lived in simplicity, humility, cheerfulness – he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.

I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me. They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction. With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.

If I were detached about the outcome of a problem, if I turned it over to God, then He could and would work on it. If I thought I had the answer and pushed for it, either mentally or physically, then the flow was blocked by my action and I sometimes got what I pushed for and sometimes did not, but the situation was never resolved. Most things I pushed for turned out to be a mess.

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude — a feeling which increases with the years.

If you simply get detach from yourself, it gets easier for you to see, how you perceive life.

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.

I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.

I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.

I think about other things while she describes her recent past: air, water, sky, time, a moment, a point somewhere when I wanted to show her everything beautiful in the world.

It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual ‘magic’ causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents the development of emotional resilience.

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

It was my letting go that gave me a better hold.

It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.

It's always pointless to get into an argument. You have to remove yourself.

It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something about it." "Thank you, Father Joe! I think I knew that once, but I'd forgotten. Contemptus mundi. We both have contempt for the world." "You p-p-persist in your error, my son. Contemptus does not mean 'contempt.' It means 'detachment.' Are you detached from the things you satirize?

Losing something she loved had ripped her open in a way she had not expected. The pain hurt, but the pain was right. The Order had wrought a galaxy in which good capitulated to evil, where human feelings—Aryn’s feelings—were crushed under the weight of Jedi nonattachment.

I used to think I was in love with Mia because she was in love with me. Now when I watch her strutting down the runway, twisting and flouncing the way her mother trained her, I know she's just a human coat hanger. A wired body I hold late at night and try to fit into.

Mind can be your best friend or worst enemy.

Many years ago I developed a theory of mutual exclusivity. I had observed in my own life that either God solved a problem or I solved the problem but both God and I did not work on the same problem at the same time. If I decided to solve it then God had better things to do than to help me. If I decided to turn the problem over to God then God would resolve the issue. When I refer to my solving the problem, I am referring to taking wilful action and deciding what the correct resolution is. If my family needs food, go out and work to earn money and feed them. There is a great difference between detachment and doing nothing.

Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current.

Most evangelicals have bought into the need for apparent indifference when writing about massively important things.

Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary.

Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew.

[...]one should act as if the things he cherished the most were already lost or broken.

...only if they remain totally detached can they have the energy to be free. Theirs is a particular type of detachment which is born not out of fear or indolence, but out of conviction.

Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God’s saving power, every new day is a gift, an opportunity to detach yourself from tormenting thoughts about food or how you look and to attach yourself to God. Remember, we all hunger for God, more than we hunger for a big bowl of ice cream or a perfect physique.

Ours was a relationship of small talk. We'd never stayed awake long into the night hoping to find in that nocturnal physical conversation a connection of minds. We hadn't stared into each others eyes because if eyes are the window to the soul it would be a little rude and embarrassing to look in. We'd created a ring-road relationship, circumventing raw emotions and complex feelings, so that our central selves were strangers.

People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after precious time has been lost, it is realized that simplicity is the key to everything.

Scientific advancement carries risk,” Kohler argued. “It always has. Space programs, genetic research, medicine—they all make mistakes. Science needs to survive its own blunders, at any cost. For everyone’s sake.” Vittoria was amazed at Kohler’s ability to weigh moral issues with scientific detachment. His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit. “You think CERN is so critical to the earth’s future that we should be immune from moral responsibility?

Precisely this one, which I had intended to be published anonymously so that it could never build any reputation on the part of the author, did become a success.... Don't aim at success - the more you aim and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

Remain in the world, act in the world, do whatsoever is needful, and yet remain transcendental, aloof, detached, a lotus flower in the pond.

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that's true nobility.

Serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers exhausted her. [...] The buried thought that he might have found comfort elsewhere was almost a comfort to her.

She breathes all the political gases that flow around this, but she never seems to inhale them.

She felt detached from all aspects of her life. She had no time anymore to feel. All that time she used to waste feeling, and analyzing her feelings, as if they were a matter of national significance.

She had come to analysis because she was, as she put it, “ruining her children.” ... “But you are so frustrating,” she said. “I want you to take something away from me, and you keep giving it back.” And what, I asked, was that “something” she wanted to give away? “The pain. The crazy,” she said. She said there was a little shrine, somewhere in the north of Brazil. The land was dry, the town impossibly poor, but people would travel for hundreds of miles to get there, to leave candles, gifts, and ex- voto offerings thanking the saint for answered prayers, for healing, for having rescued them from distress. “I bring you my worries. I bring you my tears. I bring you the dreams I have. I want to leave them here. I want to hang them on your wall and return home healed. But everything I give to you, you give back. You say, like you just said, ‘What is this “something” you want to give away?’ ” Years later I looked it up, the shrine. There were many like the one my Brazilian patient had described. One of them was a kind of cave or grotto, where pilgrims would leave little body parts carved from wood or wax: a foot, a breast, a head. From time to time the priest collected the wax objects and melted them down, making candles to be sold to other pilgrims. The walls and ceiling of the shrine were black with candle smoke and crowded with these suspended offerings. I think now that my Brazilian patient managed at least to give that away, the conjured image of a blackened shrine, hung with a jumble of body parts. I think that in the soul of each psychoanalyst such a place must exist, in spite of what we profess about our neutrality, our professional detachment. Perhaps something of what we receive can be melted down and sold back as candlelight— our costly illuminations— but other elements remain just as they appeared, the dreams nailed to the walls, the abandoned hearts and limbs, the soot of inextinguishable longing.

Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that gradually wanders among the worlds ruins and wastes!

So do not misunderstand the word passion. It is not an ugly word; it is not a thing you can buy in the market or talk about romantically. It has nothing whatever to do with emotion, feeling. It is not a respectable thing; it is a flame that destroys anything that is false. And we are always so afraid to allow that flame to devour the things that we hold dear, the things that we call important.

Stones make no splash on a frozen lake.

The majority of research I’ve reviewed describes an intense male value on inde-pendence and what appears to be an almost phobic response to dependence. In fact, for many men it’s not even an option to ask for assistance or to admit they “don’t know.” This places tremendous pressure on men to deny their vulnerability and need for information which makes detachment from relationships easier.

Success is often experienced through the absence of a past sensation rather than the presence of a new one.

Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.

Tell a child, that he will soon be homeless; he will slowly detach from the world. Tell that same child that he is now homeless, he will abandon all foundations. Tell the child he has a home again, he may return to Earth from his travels, but he will never want to see this world again.

The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a terrible year, clergy would always have a comfortable one.