Zen Detachment Quotes & Sayings

When you believe and act on your dreams, your dreams will become a reality. — Debasish Mridha

Virtually all of life's ills boil down to mindlessness. If you can understand someone else's perspective, then there's no reason to be angry at them, envy them, steal from them. — Ellen Langer

If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be 'gotcha' journalism, but it's also good journalism. — Ben Bradlee

All generals, officers, and soldiers who capitulate in battle to save their own lives should be decimated. — Napoleon Bonaparte

This is shaping up even worse than you anticipated. Still, you feel a measure of detachment, as if you had suffered everything already and this were just a flashback. You wish that you had paid more attention when a woman you met at Heartbreak told you about Zen meditation. Think of all of this as an illusion. She can't hurt you. Nothing can hurt the samurai wh enters combat fully resolved to die. You have already accepted the inevitability of termination, as they say. Still, you'd rather not have to sit through this. — Jay McInerney

From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise

All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern. — Wallace Stevens

Detachment is being apathetic or aloof to other people, while un-attachment is acknowledging and honoring other people, while choosing not to let them influence your emotional well being. Detached would mean I do not care, while un-attached means I care, although I am not going to alter my emotional state due to your emotions, words, or actions. — Alaric Hutchinson

The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the observer. — Paul Davies

To me there is a name for each person. I think it's marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It's either Gena or my mother or some other person. — John Cassavetes

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be. — Roland Merullo

It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something. — George Bernard Shaw

Remember this your lifetime through:
Tomorrow there will be more to do.
And failure waits for all who stay
With some success made yesterday.
Tomorrow you must try once more,
And even harder than before. — John Wooden

All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: 'Just lie down on the floor and keep calm. — Robert Anton Wilson

We walked into the forests which encircled the town. I have never liked them, their dark throat, their sullen height, their slump-shouldered gloom. But Evangeline walked steadily into their maw, and I followed her. She wanted to see the swathes which, years ago, the firebug had burned. The furnaced forest was green again, though here and there stood leafless trunks cindered to the core; on the scruffy dirt lay stiff black limbs tangled in morning-glory. Evangeline touched her palm to the charcoal, murmured, 'Poor things. — Sonya Hartnett

We're not lost. We're locationally challenged — John M. Ford

When you notice your world exactly as it is - free from judgment and with detachment from anticipated outcomes - that is Zen. — Dan Tricarico

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause - and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess. — Victor Davis Hanson

I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition. — Albert Ellis

You moved too much like a hunter, padding silently next to the row of plastic plants as you made your line toward me. — Lucy Christopher

A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God
that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which
it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that? — Oscar A. Romero