Detachment Quotes

“If you truly want to be respected by people you love, you must prove to them that you can survive without them.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.”
― Lao Tzu

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”
― Simone Weil

“It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.”
― Gabrielle Zevin

“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’.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd you see in your life today are just as unecessary as when you were alone.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.”
― Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us

“The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Assimilate ubiquitously. Doublethink.
To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they're false.
Examples of this in everyday life: "oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable.". Our young men today are being told that women are **, **, things to be **, beaten, **, and shamed. This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-fours hours a day for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death.
So to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds.”
― Henry Barthes

“I’ll detach myself from the crowd if it hinders my growth,
I’ll fall from the tree that won’t let me grow.”
― Hareem Ch, Hankering for Tranquility

“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.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Remain in the world, act in the world, do whatsoever is needful, and yet remain transcendental, aloof, detached, a lotus flower in the pond.”
― Osho, The secret of secrets

“...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.”
― David Baldacci, The Christmas Train

“[...]one should act as if the things he cherished the most were already lost or broken.”
― H.J. Brues, Yakuza Pride

“A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“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.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Never invest so much in anyone romantically that you lose your head. The Buddha of casual sex, I remain detached at all costs.”
― Edward Vilga, Downward Dog

“It was my letting go that gave me a better hold.”
― Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times

“Subhuti, someone might fill innumerable worlds with the seven treasures and give all away in gifts of alms, but if any good man or any good woman awakens the thought of Enlightenment and takes even only four lines from this Discourse, reciting, using, receiving, retaining and spreading them abroad and explaining them for the benefit of others, it will be far more meritorious. Now in what manner may he explain them to others? By detachment from appearances-abiding in Real Truth. -So I tell you-

Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world:

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;

A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

When Buddha finished this Discourse the venerable Subhuti, together with the bhikshus, bhikshunis, lay-brothers and sisters, and the whole realms of Gods, Men and Titans, were filled with joy by His teaching, and, taking it sincerely to heart they went their ways.”
― Siddhārtha Gautama, Diamond Sutra

“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.”
― Gary Hopkins

“The possessions themselves were not the problem, it was my relationship with possessing.”
― Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times

“There is music playing somewhere but I can't hear it.”
― Bret Easton Ellis

“Detachment is not giving up the things in this world, but accepting the fact and to be continuously aware that nothing is permanent.”
― Aditya Ajmera

“I release my parents from the feeling that they have already failed me.

I release my children from the need to bring pride to me; that they may write their own ways according to their hearts, that whisper all the time in their ears.

I release my partner from the obligation to complete myself. I do not lack anything, I learn with all beings all the time.

I thank my grandparents and forefathers who have gathered so that I can breathe life today. I release them from past failures and unfulfilled desires, aware that they have done their best to resolve their situations within the consciousness they had at that moment.

I honor you, I love you and I recognize you as innocent.

I am transparent before your eyes, so they know that I do not hide or owe anything other than being true to myself and to my very existence, that walking with the wisdom of the heart, I am aware that I fulfill my life project, free from invisible and visible family loyalties that might disturb my Peace and Happiness, which are my only responsibilities.

I renounce the role of savior, of being one who unites or fulfills the expectations of others.

Learning through, and only through, love, I bless my essence, my way of expressing, even though somebody may not understand me.

I understand myself, because I alone have lived and experienced my history; because I know myself, I know who I am, what I feel, what I do and why I do it.

I respect and approve myself.
I honor the Divinity in me and in you.
We are free.”
― Anonymous

“As long as we lean on anything outside ourselves for support, we are going to be insecure. Most of us try to find support by leaning on all sorts of things - gold, books, learning, sensory stimulation - and if these things are taken away, we fall over. To the extent that we are dependent on these external supports, we grow weaker and more liable to upsets and misfortune.”
― Eknath Easwaran, The End of Sorrow

“Like everything else, we know the futility of money only when we have more than enough of it.”
― R. N. Prasher

“We all deserve to get away and have some peace; and others deserve the peace of us getting out of their way!”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely,
sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not
supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don’t say anything
because we’re frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with
the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on
like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let
it control me. I see it for what it is.”
Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely—but eventually be
able to say, “All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling
lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other
emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie