Quotes about Detachment

Try to bear lightly what needs must be.

If I were to try to read, much less to answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won't matter. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Let go of the past. Let go of the future. Let go of the present. Proceed to the opposite shore with a free mind, leaving behind all conditioned things.

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

That world may be real for them, but it doesn't mean you have to live in it.

Seeking can become stressful when you apply the same laws that you apply in the material world - hard work, exacting plans, driving ambition, and attachment to outcome.

If others neither have goods we want nor can perform services we need, we make sure that they are at a safe distance and close ourselves off from them so that their emaciated and tortured bodies can make no inordinate claims on us.

I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism.

Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it.

How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don't concern you!

Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace.

Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment.