Mental Attachment Quotes

Do not covet your ideas.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

I have never experienced a stressful feeling that wasn't caused by attaching to an untrue thought. Behind every uncomfortable feeling, there's a thought that isn't true for us.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Attachment is the state of ignorance or forgetfulness, and thus clinging to a memory of enjoyment

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.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

The thinking person has the strange characteristic to like to create a fantasy in the place of the unsolved problem, a fantasy that stays with the person even when the problem has been solved and truth made its appearance.

One of the reasons it is so difficult to break a connection to something or someone you have imprinted on is that after you imprint, it seeds into your mind and goes from working memory to stored, hard-wired memory from which it is much more difficult to sever that attachment.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.

If you could press a button and your ego investment was less, the toothache would be less. Or less tragic at least.

Now you are on the Buddhist way. Keep up your meditation, as there is no instant illumination. The mind moves slowly into this. Do not become attached to your method. When, in the course of your meditation, your consciousness will have expanded and been transformed, you will then recognize that all the ways are valid ways.

You don’t experience anxiety unless you’re attached to a thought that isn’t true for you. It’s that simple.

The "intellectuals" will always have problems, because they always need to "know." They're often the most spiritually bankrupt people, because they never let go; they don't understand the meaning of "to transcend" the intellect.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.

You want a love which is born out of meditation, not born out of the mind.