Attachment quotes
479 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"I don't mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, deep inside yourself, you'll feel good no matter what."
"All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire."
"Find out what it means to die - not physically, that's inevitable - but to die to everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachments, to all the things that you have accumulated, the known, the known pleasures, the known fears. Die to that every minute and you will see what it means to die so that the mind is made fresh, young, and therefore innocent, so that there is incarnation not in a next life, but the next day."
"The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it."
"To work without attachment is to work without the expectation of reward."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside attachment — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."
"The world is won by those who let it go."
"Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day."
"You all know the saying which is very true: What you resist persists. And I'm sure many of you have already found that out in your life. And then suddenly when you let go of resistance you let go of an attachment to something: I need this to happen in order to be happy; I don't want what is, I want something else. To be okay with what is, which is the simplicity of this moment, is the beginning of true change."
"A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done."
"Without a doubt, one of the things which keeps us from attaining perfection is our tongue. When one has reached the point of no longer committing faults in speech, he has surely reached perfection, as was said by the Holy Spirit. The worst defect in talking is talking too much. Hence, in speech be brief and virtuous, brief and gentle, brief and simple, brief and charitable, brief and amiable."
"Only by practice and non-attachment can we conquer mind."
"How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you."
"Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities"
"In my life nothing goes wrong. When things seem to not meet my expectations, I let go of how I think things should be. It's a matter of not having any attachment to any fixed outcome."
"If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."
"In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show."
"It is only work that is done as freewill offering to humanity and to nature that does not bring with it any binding attachment."
"For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures."
"All thoughts, desires, conventions, attachments which come from outside must be ruthlessly pushed away."
"How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them."
"Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you."
"A man could be in a throne and have no attachment at all; another one could be in rags and have many attachments."
"Freedom is to be free of attachments, and the main attachment is to the 'I'-self."
"Those... who find delight in freedom from attachment in the renunciation of clinging, free from the inflow of thoughts, they are like shining lights, having reached final liberation in the world."
