Attachment famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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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 -
As gold purified in a furnace loses its impurities and achieves its own true nature, the mind gets rid of the impurities of the attributes of delusion, attachment and purity through meditation and attains Reality.
-- Adi Shankara -
You must choose between your attachments and happiness.
-- Adyashanti -
If you want to know something, go elsewhere. If you want to un-know everything, then sit and listen.
-- Adyashanti -
Once you understand non-self, then the burden of life is gone. You'll be at peace with the world. When we see beyond self, we no longer cling to happiness and we can truly be happy. Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are - no holding on, no attachment, free.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel they will be taken advantage of or oppressed. In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Love is the language of the soul when it is not colored by emotion, ego, or attachment.
-- Alan Finger -
I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.
-- Albert Einstein -
Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.
-- Albert Ellis -
I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
-- Alberto Manguel -
In this way, if you continue all the time in the way we have described from the beginning, it will become as easy and clear for you to remain in contemplation in your inward and recollected state, as to live in the natural state.
-- Albertus Magnus -
Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of a probability at least, of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love. So much meaning attached to this one little word. People bandied it about freely, using it to describe their attachments to possessions, pets, vacation destinations, and favorite foods. In the same breath they then applied this word to the person they considered most important in their lives. Wasn’t that insulting? Shouldn’t there be some other term to describe deeper emotion?
-- Alexandra Adornetto -
Did Romeo and Juliet have a ... "relationship"? The term "relationship" ... betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.
-- Allan Bloom -
If you wish to strengthen your confidence in God still more, often recall the loving way in which He has acted toward you, and how mercifully He has tried to bring you out of your sinful life, to break your attachment to the things of earth and draw you to His love.
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
God loves all those who love him: I love them that love Me.
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
Let us read the lives of the saints; let us consider the penances which they performed, and blush to be so effeminate and so fearful of mortifying our flesh.
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
It is just that he should act with reserve towards those who act with reserve towards him. On the contrary, he gives himself entirely to those souls, who, driving from their hearts everything that is not God, and does not lead them to his love, and giving themselves to him without reserve, truly say to him: My God and my all.
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
How, then, shall God give himself entirely to that one who, besides his God, loves creatures still?
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
Many, however, gives themselves to God, but preserve still in their hearts some attachment to creatures, which prevents them from belonging entirely to God.
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
He who wishes to find Jesus should seek Him, not in the delights and pleasures of the world, but in mortification of the senses.
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
Some persons are so inclined to mortify themselves that at every opportunity they have, they do so. What a beautiful practice this is, and how profitable!
-- Alphonsus Rodriguez -
A person of greater enterprise than discretion, who in embracing an opportunity has formed an unfortunate attachment.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be
-- Andrei Tarkovsky -
Another related source of demonization is the homosexual relationship itself...That attachment and communion are indeed inspired, but their source is demonic.
-- Andrew Comiskey -
One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what's gotten you there thus far.
-- Andrew Mason -
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
-- Andrew Solomon -
In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.
-- Andrew Sullivan -
We must shift our allegiances from fear to curiosity, from attachment to letting go, from control to trust, and from entitlement to humility.
-- Angeles Arrien -
Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one's own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.
-- Anthony Daniels -
‎"I have no fear of losing u, for you aren't an object of my property, or anyone else's. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.
-- Anthony de Mello -
Love...no such thing. Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering.
-- Benjamin Hoff -
Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
-- Beverly Sills -
Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'
-- Bharati Mukherjee -
The essence of the Way is detachment. And the goal of those who practice is freedom from appearances.
-- Bodhidharma -
Once you stop clinging and let things be, you'll be free, even of birth and death. You'll transform everything.
-- Bodhidharma -
Understanding that everything is impermanent, that happiness is transformed into suffering, and that all phenomena are lacking reality in themselves and are only projections of our mind, will permit us to counteract the first hindrance to meditation, that is, our attachment to this world.
-- Bokar Rinpoche -
The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.
-- Brad Blanton -
Relying on another is an expression of attachment, not love, a manifestation of insecurity and suffering, not understanding the true nature of our lives.
-- Brenda Shoshanna -
One of the most important of life´s lessons is to learn independance, to understand freedom. This means independence from attachments, from results, from opinions, and from expectations. Breaking attachments leads to freedom, but breaking attachments does not mean abandoning a loving and meaningful relationship, a relationship that nourrishes your soul. It means ending dependency on any person or thing. Love is never a dependency.
-- Brian Weiss -
When you’re focused outside and believe that your problem is caused by someone else, rather than by your attachment to the story you’re believing in the moment, then you are your own victim, and the situation appears to be hopeless.
-- Byron Katie -
A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.
-- Byron Katie -
Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.
-- Caroline Knapp -
A lot of people, quite frankly, think intense attachments to animals are weird and suspect, the domain of people who can't quite handle attachments to humans.
-- Caroline Knapp -
Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.
-- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche -
The human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear.
-- Charles James -
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.
-- Charles Lamb -
Lose everything, even the attachment to holiness, so that you aim only at one thing: to love
-- Chiara Lubich -
A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.
-- Christopher Lasch -
..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.
-- Colm Toibin -
What is... disturbing to me is that many of these pro-Israeli lawmakers sit on the House International Relations Committee despite the obvious conflict of interest that their emotional attachments to Israel cause... The Israeli occupation of all territories must end, including Congress.
-- Cynthia McKinney -
We cannot hope to die peacefully if our lives have been full of violence, or if our minds have mostly been agitated by emotions like anger, attachment, or fear. So if we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well: Hoping for a peaceful death, we must cultivate peace in our mind, and in our way of life.
-- Dalai Lama -
The compassion we feel normally is biased and mixed with attachment. Genuine compassion flows towards all living beings, particularly your enemies. If I try to develop compassion towards my enemy, it may not benefit him directly, he may not even be aware of it. But it will immediately benefit me by calming my mind. On the other hand, if I dwell on how awful everything is, I immediately lose my peace of mind.
-- Dalai Lama -
One can be deceived by three types of laziness: of indolence, which is the wish to procrastinate; the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your capabilities; and the laziness that is attachment to negative actions, or putting great effort into non-virtue.
-- Dalai Lama -
According to Buddhist practice, there are three stages or steps. The initial stage is to reduce attachment towards life. The second stage is the elimination of desire and attachment to this samsara. Then in the third stage, self-cherishing is eliminated
-- Dalai Lama -
The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others. Rather, we must criticize ourselves. How much am I doing about my anger? About my attachment, about my hatred, about my pride, my jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life.
-- Dalai Lama -
Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.
-- Dalai Lama -
Attachment constrains our vision so that we are not able to see things from a wider perspective.
-- Dalai Lama -
There needs to be understanding that anger never helps to solve a problem. It destroys our peace of mind and blinds our ability to think clearly. Anger and attachment are emotions that distort our view of reality.
-- Dalai Lama -
When you begin your transcendental training, focusing your best efforts, without attachment to outcomes, you will understand the peaceful warrior's way.
-- Dan Millman -
At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.
-- Daniel J. Siegel -
Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
-- David Foster Wallace -
This is the hard part about having best friends that I feel no attachment to -- I don't give them any benefit of the doubt. And being best friends is always about the benefit of the doubt.
-- David Levithan -
It's almost heartening to think that the attachment you have can define your perception as much as any other influence.
-- David Levithan -
It is my desire to show my attachment to the cause of Him who died for me by devoting my life to His service.
-- David Livingstone -
I saw the duty and inestimable privilege _immediately_ to accept salvation by Christ. Humbly believing that through sovereign mercy and grace I have been enabled so to do, and having felt in some measure its effects on my still depraved and deceitful heart, it is my desire to show my attachment to the cause of Him who died for me by devoting my life to his service.
-- David Livingstone -
Mindfulness is an ancient meditation mode in which we let go of our fears, our attachments to control and being right, our expectations and entitlements, and our judgments of others. Instead of these popular strategies, we learn to simply stay present opening in the moment - with nothing in the way - so we can experience life as it occurs.
-- David Richo -
From a spiritual perspective, freedom from attachment to a particular outcome is the ultimate expression of liberation. We can choose the actions we take, but we cannot control the consequences of our choices.
-- David Simon -
Washington is still very much a male-oriented culture. Being from Los Angeles, I think it is less so there - there is less attachment to tradition, perhaps, there is more flexibility, more acceptance of change generally. That is partly because of Hollywood.
-- Dee Dee Myers -
In my life nothing goes wrong. When things seem to not meet my expectations, I let go of how I think things should be. It's a matter of not having any attachment to any fixed outcome.
-- Deepak Chopra -
Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities
-- Deepak Chopra -
Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just a stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is yourself left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities.
-- Deepak Chopra -
Love allows your beloved the freedom to be unlike you. Attachment asks for conformity to your needs and desires. Love imposes no demands. Attachment expresses an overwhelming demand - "Make me feel whole." Love expands beyond the limits of two people. Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people.
-- Deepak Chopra -
The first call which every Christian experiences is the call to abandon the attachments of this world.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer -
Sentient beings, self and others, enemies and dear ones-all are made by thoughts. It is like seeing a rope and mistaking it for a snake. When we think that the rope is a snake, we are scared, but once we see that we are looking at a rope, our fear dissipates. We have been deluded by our thoughts. Likewise, mentally fabricating self and others, we generate attachment and aversion.
-- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche -
Spending your time with true spiritual friends will fill you with love for all beings and help you to see how negative attachment and hatred are. Being with such friends, and following their example, will naturally imbue you with their good qualities, just as all the birds flying around a golden mountain are bathed in its golden radiance.
-- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche -
It's a great wonder to me, the Irish attachment to our history. What is it but a series of lamentations?
-- Dorothy Salisbury Davis -
Imagine craving absolutely nothing from the world. Imagine cutting the invisible strings that so painfully bind us: what would that be like? Imagine the freedoms that come from the ability to enjoy things without having to acquire them, own them, possess them. Try to envision a relationship based on acceptance and genuine care rather than expectation. Imagine feeling completely satisfied and content with your life just as it is. Who wouldn't want this? This is the enjoyment of non-attachment.
-- Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche -
Melting our attachment to self is the most powerful medication for bringing mental and emotional imbalances in check.
-- Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche -
To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.
-- E. F. Schumacher -
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
You all know the saying which is very true: What you resist persists. And I'm sure many of you have already found that out in your life. And then suddenly when you let go of resistance you let go of an attachment to something: I need this to happen in order to be happy; I don't want what is, I want something else. To be okay with what is, which is the simplicity of this moment, is the beginning of true change.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.
-- Edgar Allan Poe -
It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army 168 and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
-- Edmund Burke -
Instead of pressing, with the foremost of the crowd, into the palace of Constantinople, Libanius calmly expected his arrival at Antioch; withdrew from court on the first symptoms of coldness and indifference; required a formal invitation for each visit; and taught his sovereign an important lesson, that he might command the obedience of a subject, but that he must deserve the attachment of a friend.
-- Edward Gibbon -
If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.
-- Edward Snowden -
The spiritual life is a call to action. But it is a call to ... action without any selfish attachment to the results.
-- Eknath Easwaran -
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
-- Erich Fromm -
I've spoken with friends who are rabbis and priests and we've agreed that most people have an emotional attachment to their faith, a desire to fulfill their spiritual longings, but they are not experts in understanding the history of their religion.
-- Feisal Abdul Rauf -
My dear fellow," he continued more soberly, "If you have managed to complicate things by forming a sentimental attachment in less than a week, then I doubt there is anything I can do for you. You, sir, are a romantic, and I suspect your condition is incurable.
-- Frances Hardinge -
Attachment is the main thing that is blocking your path towards enlightenment.
-- Garchen Rinpoche -
The act of the soul, in surrendering itself into the hands of Christ, forms a connecting bond between Him as the Vine and the soul as the branches, which communicates life, strength, nourishment, and beauty. In a word, with a just view of the character, and a supreme attachment to the person of Christ, the believer yields himself into His hands as a full and complete Saviour. Him he receives; upon Him he rests, and rests for time and eternity.
-- Gardiner Spring -
The biggest barrier to dealing with climate change is us: our own attachment to habits that are hard to shift, and our great ability to park or ignore uncomfortable choices.
-- Geoff Mulgan -
Being attached is what prevents us from seeing, it is what clouds this miraculous awareness.
-- Geoffrey Shugen Arnold -
Every selfish motive therefore, every family attachment, ought to recommend such a system of policy as would provide no less carefully for the rights and happiness of the lowest than of the highest orders of Citizens.
-- George Mason -
I desire many things concerning myself; but I desire nothing so much, as to have a heart filled with love to the Lord. I long for a warm personal attachment to Him.
-- George Muller
