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.
Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.
We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
"I have no fear of losing u, for you aren't an object of my property, or anyone else's. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.
Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas. . . . . . . . scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.
It is attachment to creatures and to self-satisfaction that weakens the blessings of love in your heart. You must die to all that, if you wish the pure love of God to reign therein.
If you follow nature you will not be able to vanquish the tragic in any real degree in your art. . . We must free ourselves from our attachment to the external, for only then do we transcend the tragic, and are enabled consciously to contemplate the repose which is within all things.
To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering.
Attachment is the root cause of all misery - and our mind is such that it starts clinging to each and everything. It starts becoming identified, attached, it does not know how to keep a distance; hence the misery.
Soul development depends on attachment and bonding. Every brain and body is genetically wired to develop itself, but the full soul development of brain and body depends on each child receiving the care of between two and five completely bonded caregivers.
I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it.
Life is not suffering; it's just that you will suffer it, rather than enjoy it, until you let go of your mind's attachments and just go for the ride freely, no matter what happens.
The primary object of meditation is to not become overly attached to any particular thoughts that may come into to the mind. It is most important to let the mind "flow," with less mental worry about, and attachment to, the various thoughts that may come into the mind.
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.
Attachment is the food for the mind to continue. Non-attached witnessing is the way to stop it without any effort to stop it. And when you start enjoying those blissful moments, your capacity to retain them for longer periods arises.
Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.
Some people have a very strange idea that material success does not coincide harmoniously with self-realization, which is absurd. The aversion to material success, or the clinging to it, is an attachment.
Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just a stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is yourself left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities.
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.
To work without attachment is to work without the expectation of reward.