Top 100 Quotes About Detachment
#1. And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.
Eugene O'Neill
#2. Let us never be afraid of innocent joy; God is good and what he does is well done; resign yourself to everything, even happiness; ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of detachment, of renunciation, and above all, for the spirit of joy and gratitude.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#3. For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress ... I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.
Nan Goldin
#4. She lived and breathed, Brrr knew, with a high tolerance for detachment - like a lake jellyfish floating in a glass casket, oblivious of japing crowds.
Gregory Maguire
#5. Detachment doesn't mean avoiding things and going to Himalayas. It means doing what is necessary without drowning in it.
Sumit Singh
#6. Wandering, (is) considered as a state of detachment form every given point in space ...
Georg Simmel
#7. Just a little detachment from the ego is needed.
Rajneesh
#8. In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.
Ram Dass
#9. Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.
Penelope Lively
#10. Life is easy For the man who is without shame, Impudent as a crow, A vicious gossip, Vain, meddlesome, dissolute. But life is hard For the man who quietly undertakes The way of perfection, With purity, detachment and vigor. He sees light.
Gautama Buddha
#11. What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.
Joss Whedon
#12. In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.
Sun Tzu
#13. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world around me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
H.G.Wells
#14. To be honest, I'm trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.
Mark Haddon
#15. The yoga of selfless giving is easy for anyone to practice. The key is detachment. The spirit is unattachment to results.
Frederick Lenz
#17. No man of action has more completely attained the point of view of the scientific historian, who observes the movements of mankind with the same detachment as a bacteriologist observes bacilli under a microscope and yet with a sympathy that springs from his own common manhood. In
B.H. Liddell Hart
#18. Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, with discipline and detachment.
Epictetus
#19. It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality.
Jeremy Rifkin
#20. Mankind, if it is to survive, must choose its leaders by the test of their intellectuality; and, contrarily, leadership must justify itself by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis.
John Keegan
#21. As the late afternoon sun shone in Shaw's face and a soft flower-scented wind cooled him, his unhappiness turned to a detachment that was not at all unpleasant. He was utterly alone in the world. This knowledge thrilled him.
Gore Vidal
#22. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Susan Sontag
#23. Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.
Robert Harris
#24. He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically.
Edith Wharton
#25. Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence - not detachment and objectivity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. There's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.
Jeremy Irons
#27. One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.
Marianne Moore
#28. And Judith, the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness.
William Faulkner
#29. She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her
Henry James
#30. She examined with curious detachment - so rare for her to feel anything these days - and discovered that what she felt was unease.
Stephen Lloyd Jones
#31. Only in the stillness of detachment can the soul yield up her secrets.
Elsa Barker
#32. Detachment is the ultimate pleasure.
Saraha
#33. For most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough.
Guy Spier
#34. Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary.
Remy De Gourmont
#35. Attachment is the source of pain, but detachment is the source of joy.
Debasish Mridha
#36. The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
H.P. Lovecraft
#37. The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
(A Qualified Farewell)
Raymond Chandler
#38. How should the little creatures, the awakened worlds, reach out to knowledge of the whole cosmos, and of the divine? Instead they must play their own part in the drama, and appreciate their own tragic end with godlike detachment and relish.
Olaf Stapledon
#39. The practice of Detachment encourages the positive aspects of your life to become dominant, while providing a clear path for the negative aspects to recede.
Gary Hopkins
#40. ...detachment from anger is one part of wisdom.
Steven Saylor
#41. There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ...
T. S. Eliot
#42. Colin could not recall a single woman ever regarding him with anything so neutral as detachment. It suddenly seemed important to ascertain whether she was pretty, in the same way it was necessary to know whether a man was armed.
Julie Anne Long
#43. This kind of business (murder) required detachment. The trick was to do it almost casually, as you might flick on the radio, or swat a mosquito.
Clive Barker
#44. I declared her brain frozen and assumed command of the local Warden detachment, which was handy, since it consisted of only me anyway.
Jim Butcher
#45. Humor is detachment, and detachment sets you free.
Marty Rubin
#46. When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road.
Howard Nemerov
#47. Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.
Isabel Allende
#48. Detachment, n. Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it.
David Levithan
#49. Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.
Lewis Hyde
#50. What did I get in return? Coldness and emotional detachment. You are selfish and bitter and you wouldn't know a good thing if it fell out of the sky at your feet.
Tarryn Fisher
#52. Asperger's syndrome is associated with organization, focus, innovative thinking, and rational detachment.
Graeme Simsion
#53. Yea, if a man possess all things he cannot be content, - the greater his possessions the less will be his contentment, for the heart cannot be satisfied with possessions, but rather in detachment from all things and in poverty of spirit.
San Juan De La Cruz
#54. She noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer.
Ayn Rand
#55. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.
J.D. Vance
#56. Unrealistic expectations often lead to disappointment, while simple unbiased attention and detachment to outcome often lead to pleasant surprises.
Gary Hopkins
#57. One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.
Adrienne Rich
#58. Another aspect inviting contemplation is the fact that the affective tone of any feeling depends on the type of contact that has caused its arising. Once this conditioned nature of feelings is fully apprehended, detachment arises naturally and one's identification with feelings starts to dissolve.
Analayo
#59. Joy is the outcome of detachment from self and lives in freedom of spirit.
Anonymous
#60. Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
#61. There is nothing harder to come by than detachment and solitude; and nothing more important.
Marya Mannes
#62. Let us realize that engagement and detachment aren't opposite-the more engaged we become, the more detached we will have to be..
Deepak Chopra
#63. A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
Edward Abbey
#64. The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development.
John Desmond Bernal
#65. Joy only can be achieved through complete detachment, the detachment which is egoless and superegoless.
Nirmala Srivastava
#66. Attachment to the Divine leads to detachment from the mind. This leads to the realization that the nature of the Seer and the Divine are the same.
A. G. Mohan
#67. Sometimes you'll see people give performances in comedy with an ironic detachment where they'll sort of be remarking on the character from outside of it. They're sort of commenting as they're playing the character. I think it's hard not to do that. I've certainly done that.
Zach Woods
#68. The property of the estate owners (pomeshchiks) doesn't belong to any particular detachment, but to the people as a whole. Let the people take what they want.
Maria Nikiforova
#69. Violet, surveying him with a cruel detachment, had never felt less married.
Louis Auchincloss
#70. At times I suffered from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me. I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night.
H.G.Wells
#71. Love faded, or flipped over into loathing. Or settled somewhere in between into a kind of grinding detachment. It could snap like a dry twig, with one careless step.
Nora Roberts
#72. Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood - or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.
Zelda Fitzgerald
#73. It isn't so much life's problems that challenge us but the emotional turbulence stirred up while trying to deal with them. People possessing the gift of emotional detachment are lucky in that their personal problems seem far less problematic.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#74. Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
Emil Cioran
#75. I do know that detachment is important. A surgeon can't be weeping into the open wound.
Randa Haines
#76. The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
Sigmund Freud
#77. Some jobs required a certain level of detachment; a turning off of emotions in order to do the things that needed to be done.
Julie James
#78. Think of a world where "Detachment", "Gratitude" and "Empathy" were subjects included in every grade school's curriculum. A new generation would emerge with an attitude of peace, contentment and an overall appreciation for everything and everyone
Gary Hopkins
#79. In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter - which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking 'enlightenment' meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.
Nancy Pearcey
#80. Those who conquer their minds are beings of renunciation and detachment. They are beings of renunciation and detachment they are lovingly focused on the True One, they realize and understand themselves.
Guru Nanak
#81. Prasanta, who was later going to be sorry to see Purba go, experienced the dazed detachment someone feels when events they ignited go far beyond a reasonable trajectory they had imagined.
Neel Mukherjee
#83. Our Lord Himself, not being detached from things externally. Our Lord was amazingly in and out among ordinary things; His detachment was on the inside towards God. External detachment is often an indication of a secret vital attachment to the things we keep away from externally.
Oswald Chambers
#84. It seemed so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.
Barbara Pym
#85. People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.
Nora Ephron
#86. You did not expect human values from a machine. You did not grow angry with a machine, or be disappointed or feel betrayed by it. You treated it with detachment and curiosity, as you would any soul-deprived object, and if it kicked you in the teeth, you side-stepped and kicked it back, harder.
Dorothy Dunnett
#88. [When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#89. Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.
Anthony Marais
#90. Surrendering means cleansing yourself completely, getting completely detached. Detachment is the only way you can rise.
Nirmala Srivastava
#91. If you resort to violent methods because the other side has destroyed your monastery, for example, you then have lost not only your monastery, but also your special Buddhist practices of detachment, love, and compassion.
Dalai Lama
#92. Theory in any branch of science entails a risk of detachment from reality
Quammen, David
#93. Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.
Lisa Randall
#94. Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight -- which, being less painful, is more objective?
Thomas Buergenthal
#95. Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate
#96. DeWitt: Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment. And sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the people least capable of it.
Jane Espenson
#97. This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.
Gabriel Marcel
#98. More often than not, the demons of our nature love a recluse; nobody is more vulnerable to himself than the solitary. To imagine that one can simply withdraw, and somehow achieve peace, or wisdom, or detachment, is a mistake. It is also, in most cases, inappropriate, selfish, and even cowardly.
John Burnside
#100. He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment.
Meister Eckhart
