Detachment Quotes - Page 7

• 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

  People, Ironic, Care

  "Joss Whedon on writing horror and superheroes for fanboys and casual viewers alike". Interview with Sean O'Neal, www.avclub.com. April 18, 2012.

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• I'm not prescribing non-doing as a universal response to our problems. Sometimes, something obviously needs to be done. And we retreat into a spiritual or meditative state that we fancy up by calling it mindfulness, but really it's an unhealthy detachment and a shrinking back from life. But culturally, it's much more common to be trapped in habits of reaction, whether on a systemic level or on a personal level. That's where the non-doing comes in, which is something that we don't really have room for. I think that it's something we need to embrace as part of the creative process.

  Charles Eisenstein

  Spiritual, Thinking, Creative

  Source: www.mindfulnessbell.org

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• ... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

  Tim O'Brien

  Eye, Kissing, Numbness

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The law of karma is neither fatalistic nor punitive; nor is man a hapless, helpless victim in its bonds. God has blessed each one of us with reason, intellect and discrimination, as well as the sovereign free will. Even when our past karma inclines us toward evil, we can consciously tune our inclination towards detachment and ego-free action, thus lightening the karmic load.

  Dada Vaswani

  Karma, Blessed, Past

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• Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Mean, Order

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.21, New Directions Publishing

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• I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Gratitude, War, Men

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (March 12, 1932), as quoted in "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections" edited by Alice Kimball Smith (p. 155), 1995.

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• Hitler overestimated the importance of [technology]. As a result, he would count on a mere handful of assault-gun detachment or the new Tiger tanks to restore situations where only large bodies of troops could have any prospect of success.

  Erich von Manstein

  Gun, Technology, Tanks

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• Detachment does not mean to neglect what Krishna gives you. Detachment means to do the needful as an offering to Krishna.

  Radhanath Swami

  Mean, Offering, Giving

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• Just a little detachment from the ego is needed.

  Rajneesh

  Ego, Littles, Needed

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• For the Christian mystics, detachment meant to leave attachment so that God could enter you and take over completely and you could climb the ladder to their heaven. Kind of crazy, but what the hell?

  Gerald Stern

  Christian, Crazy, Attachment

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You could be attached to merely a description of a plant or a flower. Or a narrative of an event. Or rage at injustice. Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets, in their rage, were being altogether attached - not at all detached, although as I think of the word "detachment," I also think of a sheet of paper, loose from its notebook, fluttering around somewhere in the wind trying to find its home again.

  Gerald Stern

  Notebook, Flower, Home

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions - like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Believe, Night, Men

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• A lot of times in spiritual communities, detachment is considered to be an expression of being spiritually evolved when often, we have want and fear around being in relationship with each other.

  Tara Brach

  Spiritual, Expression, Community

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Way, Philosopher

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.17, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The fear side can have us pull away and protect us, but it's really a withdrawal, a disassociation, a cutting off. Rather than the word detachment, I usually use the word non-attachment. That can be wholesome when we care and are completely engaged with each other but are not attached to things being a certain way.

  Tara Brach

  Cutting, Attachment, Withdrawal

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Because I frequently encountered obstacles such as old, entrenched ideas, ongoing power struggles, or the lack of staff and money, I also learned to develop patience and detachment.

  Corinne McLaughlin

  Struggle, Obstacles, Power Struggle

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Our detachments move us toward freedom and death.

  Mason Cooley

  Moving, Commitment

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• 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

  Art, Wall, Years

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

  Susan Sontag

  Mass Culture, Age, Matter

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• 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.

  J. D. Salinger

  Children, Responsibility, House

  "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)". "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction". Book by J. D. Salinger, 1963.

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• As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

  Haruki Murakami

  Moving, Numbness, Long

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• I wanted to turn everything off, too. Just press a button - click - and shut myself down. Turn off my heart, turn off my mind, turn off my body - just lie there, senseless, like a dormant tree in winter, waiting for the spring to return.

  Kevin Brooks

  Spring, Lying, Heart

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• Being anthropologically respectful of all faiths means being committed to none, and being left to drift without an anchor for one's most deeply held beliefs. To have such an anchor means being committed to a specific community. The only way Obama can overcome his sense of detachment and resolve his mother's dilemma is through a commitment to Christianity.

  Simon Critchley

  Mother, Mean, Commitment

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

  John Irving

  Thinking, Trying, Outsiders

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• The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Technology, Alphabet, Process

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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