Detachment Quotes

Spending hours stressed out in front of the TV isn’t the same as volunteering or donating. Feeling a high level of personal distress makes people feel agitated and emotionally drained, to the point that they lack the energy or detachment to help – or the energy to manage themselves.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that’s the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

The essence of the Way is detachment.

The world calls for, and expects from us, simplicity of life, the spirit of prayer, charity towards all, especially towards the lowly and the poor, obedience and humility, detachment, and self-sacrifice. Without this mark of holiness, our word will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man.

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.

I don’t come from a famous family and don’t have this detachment from everyday people and everyday life. I’m just doing my job and the attention that comes with it is part of the territory.

What is attempted in these film is of course a synthesis. But it can be seen by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure.

Is detachment the answer to freedom? No, because detachment is negative – it is to be without. The answer must be positive – I must replace what I have with something better.

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment.

If you don’t do yoga, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a sense of detachment, which means not attaching yourself to your thoughts or your emotions.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

The most sinister aspect of Jack is his detachment, his ability to distance himself from his feelings.

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.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn’t have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

To be consistently effective, you must put a certain distance between yourself and what happens to you on the golf course. This is not indifference, it’s detachment.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It’s the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical – in my case, anyway – but also quite detached.

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.

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.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

As a journalist, you want to try to maintain that objectivity and detachment.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

It is a sad but undeniable reality that people have died in the line of duty since the earliest days of the United Nations. The first was Ole Bakke, a Norwegian member of the United Nations guard detachment, shot and killed in Palestine in 1948. The toll since then has included colleagues at all levels.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.