Detachment Quotes

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments it is a whole-time job. (W. Somerset Maugham)
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. View quote
John le Carré
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. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror-for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. An actor like Al Pacino lives to act. I'm not sure though, there's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy. View quote
Jeremy Irons
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. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved. View quote
John of the Cross
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world? View quote
Emil Cioran
What all this posturing and fake glamor results in is a vast detachment and cynicism on the part of the artists. Since it's impossible to have respect for an audience that'll take just about anything you care to dish out, and the impassive demeanor is so central to the role, a general numbnose is all that can be expected. View quote
Lester Bangs
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)
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility. View quote
William Osler
We must allow every day of our lives to represent healthy closure now! When we live for love, this is most natural because all of our associations will be quality associations in which we share our compassion, determination, and realizations, and receive the same from others. This is the technology of how to celebrate life now and live with proper preparation and detachment, so that we will master the science of dying before dying so as to connect with the should and its home-the spiritual world. After all, death is to remove all that is false and secondary. I am that lowly beggar who is desperately trying to die before dying. View quote
Bhakti Tirtha Swami
To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. View quote
Erich Fromm
To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed. View quote
Oswald Spengler
Woman's soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronoucedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment. View quote
Edith Stein
Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected - never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life. View quote
J. D. Salinger
In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life. View quote
Salvatore Quasimodo
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. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
The essence of the Way is detachment. View quote
Bodhidharma
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. (Bede Griffiths)
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. View quote
Sam Snead
The most sinister aspect of Jack is his detachment, his ability to distance himself from his feelings. View quote
Victor Garber
To accept a trial is to thank God for it, with the understanding that it permits us a victory, a detachment with regard to the world and with regard to the ego. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
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. View quote
James Dickey