Quotes & Sayings About Emotional Attachments

Then Gai told me about the famous cup of the heart, which I should now begin to empty. The Sufis compare our spiritual heart, the seat of God within us, with a cup into which the love of God flows. This cup, however, needs to be emptied before it can be filled with Divine love. This emptying is a long process that requires courage, strength of character, determination, and, above all, sincerity. It is a process of reining in and eventually extinguishing the ego, of letting go of material needs, bad and unhealthy habits and emotional attachments in order to make room for God. Sufis often likened it to the process of dying and being born again. 'Die before you die' is a famous Sufi saying. This was the essence of every spiritual path, Gai told me. — Kristiane Backer

We humans, once we have become emotionally invested in a homeplace, a prized personal possession, or, especially, in another person, find it immensely difficult to give them up ... Because they were made at a time of life when we were utterly dependent on them, the love attachments of infancy have inordinate power over us, more than any other emotional investment. — Louise J. Kaplan

Gabriel discourages emotional attachments the way most of us discourage door-to-door salesmen. They're inconvenient, intrusive, and liable to end up saddling you with something you never wanted in the first place, at a cost far higher than you wish to pay. — Kelley Armstrong

A more promising hypothesis is that happiness comes from within and cannot be obtained by making the world conform to your desires. This idea was widespread in the ancient world: Buddha in India and the Stoic philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome all counseled people to break their emotional attachments to people and events, which are always unpredictable and uncontrollable, and to cultivate instead an attitude of acceptance. This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world. — Jonathan Haidt

Our recent research indicates that an absence of warmth, acceptance, and support characterizes the early family life of many hoarders, perhaps leading them to form strong emotional attachments to possessions. — Gail Steketee

Think about any attachments that are depleting your emotional reserves. Consider letting them go. — Oprah Winfrey

Generosity says a great deal about a person's emotional and spiritual development. When it's hard to give, or it feels like ripping away a part of the self, we are still anchored in our attachments or stories we've created about scarcity. If this applies to you, make friends with the part of you that feels resentful or finds it difficult to give. — Charlotte Kasl

These people hadn't just lost a job; they'd lost an identity. They'd spent countless hours demonstrating loyalty to the business, knowing, of course, that they were only as valuable as their last deal. But this is the trick that a job can sometimes play on us: we know we're working at the pleasure of a manager, an owner, a corporation, but we're human and can't help but develop emotional attachments to the work we do. We begin to identify ourselves with our employers and believe that a business can return our loyalty. Sometimes businesses do. But when it comes down to it, a corporation's first allegiance is to its own survival. Everyone benefits from the idea that we're all in it together - until suddenly we're not. — Wes Moore

Emotional attachments are messy. They end with broken hearts and stalking. — Lauren Barnholdt

The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs - whether they love it or hate it. Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people. — Girl Talk

Resolution number one: Obviously will lose twenty pounds. Number two: Always put last night's panties in the laundry basket. Equally important, will find sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobic's, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things — Helen Fielding

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments. — Daniel J. Siegel

What is ... disturbing to me is that many of these pro-Israeli lawmakers sit on the House International Relations Committee despite the obvious conflict of interest that their emotional attachments to Israel cause ... The Israeli occupation of all territories must end, including Congress. — Cynthia McKinney

The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account. — Anthony Storr

When it comes to sexuality, romantic love plays a large part in feminine sexual scripts. Research suggests that women make sense of sexual encounters in terms of the amount of intimacy experienced; love becomes a rationale for sex. If i am in love, women often reason, sex is okay. Men more easily accept sex for its own sake, with no emotional strings necessarily attached. In this way, sexual scripts for men have involved more of an instrumental (sex for its own sake) approach, whereas for women it tends to be more expressive (sex involving emotional attachments). There is evidence to suggest that women are moving in the direction of sex as an end in itself without the normative constraints of an emotional relationship. By and large, however, women are still more likely than men to engage in sex as an act of love. Many scholars suggest that romance is one of the key ways that sexism is maintained in society. — Susan Shaw

Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging. — Tom Paulin

With this understanding of love's meaning it is clear that more often than not slavery made it all but impossible for black people to love one another. When emotional ties were established between individuals, when children were born to enslaved mothers and fathers, these attachments were often severed. No matter the tenderness of connection, it was often overshadowed by the trauma of abandonment and loss. — Bell Hooks