Attachment Quotes

Renew, release, let go. Yesterday’s gone. There’s nothing you can do to bring it back. You can’t “should’ve” done something. You can only DO something. Renew yourself. Release that attachment. Today is a new day!

~ Steve Maraboli

The reason many people in our society are miserable, sick, and highly stressed is because of an unhealthy attachment to things they have no control over.

~ Steve Maraboli

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.

~ Hugo Hamilton

You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

True love is not a hide and seek game: in true love, both lovers seek each other.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

~ Neil Gaiman

Abide not with dualism,Carefully avoid pursuing it;As soon as you have right and wrong,Confusion ensues, and Mind is lost. (172)

~ Edward Conze

Try not to seek after the trueOnly cease to cherish opinions. (172)

~ Edward Conze

Without attachment, a naked body is merely a lifeless sex-toy.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It is useful to study different traditions in order to be free of attachment to any one way of expressing what is beyond expression. (x)

~ Ravi Ravindra

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We commonly confuse love with the strong emotions most often associated with it, such as joy, attachment, lust, infatuation, pleasure, pain, fear, and hope, to name a few. But, love is not a feeling; love itself is an action. There are countless emotions and beliefs that can cause us to love. Love is the willing giving of self to another living being. Love is giving the life, time, energy, and resources that we would normally give or use for our self to someone else. Love is an action that enhances the well-being of another living being.

~ C W Newman

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

He who sacrifices his respect for love basically burns his body to obtain the light.

~ Amit Kalantri

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

~ Jane Austen

Attachment-abhorrence is the foundation for the worldly life and the foundation for ‘Knowledge’ is a state free of all attachments (vitragta).

~ Dada Bhagwan

Yes, a deep lesson from the postage stamp. It attaches itself to a moveable material, the envelope and gets going. A good relationship keeps you going forward; a bad one keeps you static. Attach yourself to someone who is also going forward and you will also get there.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Somewhere between love and hate lies confusion, misunderstanding and desperate hope.

~ Shannon L. Alder

for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses.Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959(

~ John Bowlby

A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.

~ Jeremy Holmes

Love is not the answer, peace is. Throughout my whole life I have experienced and seen others use love as a reason to treat people with unkindness by being controlling, jealous, shouting in anger, and projecting guilt and shame. If you love someone but there is not peace in your heart when you think of that person then your work is not done. Do not stop at love, continue all the way towards the freedom of inner peace. Love starts when peace begins. Without peace love is simply a mask for our insecurity, judgment, and egoic attachments.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.

~ Jane Austen

As spiritual searchers we need to become freer and freer of the attachment to our own smallness in which we get occupied with me-me-me. Pondering on large ideas or standing in front of things which remind us of a vast scale can free us from acquisitiveness and competitiveness and from our likes and dislikes. If we sit with an increasing stillness of the body, and attune our mind to the sky or to the ocean or to the myriad stars at night, or any other indicators of vastness, the mind gradually stills and the heart is filled with quiet joy. Also recalling our own experiences in which we acted generously or with compassion for the simple delight of it without expectation of any gain can give us more confidence in the existence of a deeper goodness from which we may deviate. (39)

~ Ravi Ravindra

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.

~ Mary Rose O'reilley

From the dear comes grief; From the dear comes fear.If you're freed from the dear You'll have no grief, let alone fear.

~ Anonymous

Fear creates attachment. Look around at the people and things you feel attached to; the people and things that you believe you can't live without. What is it that you are afraid of? Make it a goal to let go of attachment and, when you do, the fear will leave and unexpectedly beautiful things can come into its place. That is the reward for living in love and faith, instead of in fear.

~ Kate Mcgahan

All the so-called philosophical notion of “love without attachment” or “detached love” are biologically non-existent on this planet. We humans are biologically designed through millions of years of evolution to grow attachment. Love cannot survive without attachment.

~ Abhijit Naskar

When a thing becomes indispensable it's time to give it up.

~ Marty Rubin

But, as your saints teach and we have always known, attachment enslaves you. Only those free from it see the world as it really is and have power over themselves and all things.

~ Lian Hearn

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

~ Stefan Molyneux

She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.

~ Mahita Vas

You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.

~ Agnes Chew

Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.

~ Agnes Chew

Beauty is irrelevant to human life, especially in a relationship. What you today perceive as beautiful and special, over time, becomes not so special. That’s how the human brain works. It is not beauty that keeps a relationship alive, it is attachment. Without attachment, a naked body is merely a lifeless sex toy.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Beauty is an illusion, created by Mother Nature to drive the human species in the path of reproduction. In reality, beauty is irrelevant to human life, especially in a relationship. What you today perceive as beautiful and special, over time, becomes not so special. That’s how the human brain works. It is not beauty that keeps a relationship alive, it is attachment. Without attachment, a naked body is merely a lifeless sex toy.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If a person were to get stuck in attachment induced entrancement for any worldly thing for just one hour, then it will last for a hundred years! Because of pleasure resulting effects and intents of engrossment, an indulging bad habit will last one day of Brahma (many many years), therefore it is not worth focusing our awareness anywhere (other than our true self, pure soul).

~ Dada Bhagwan

Chit’s tendencies can become pure [transparent] in front of God, but people don’t have this knowhow. The easiest solution to purify chit’s tendencies is to associate with a person who has the least amount of desires and the ultimate solution to make them pure is the inner visual contemplation (niddidhyasan) of the Vitarag (the enlightened ones who are free of all attachments).

~ Dada Bhagwan

Once you understand the innate nature (relative self, prakruti) of the other person, you can remain in an attachment-free state with that person. It is Knowledge (Gnan) to understand the innate nature of a person, and once Knowledge arises, so will conduct.

~ Dada Bhagwan

The Soul is neither a Jain nor a Vaishnav. The Soul is Vitarag (free from attachment). This is the religion of the Vitarag (the enlightened ones).

~ Dada Bhagwan