Spiritual Detachment Quotes

It's autumn and everybody feels like a disembodied spirit then.

And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.

A man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world - his heart to God and his hands to work.

Oh! it is sweet to be thus weaned from friends, and from myself, and dead to the present world, that so I may live wholly to and upon the blessed God!

There are many who say to the Lord, "I give myself wholly to Thee, without any reserve," but there are few who embrace the practice of this abandonment, which consists in receiving with a certain indifference every sort of event, as it happens in conformity with Divine Providence, as well afflictions as consolations, contempt and reproaches as honor and glory.

"Why should I become angry just because another man has made a fool of himself. Do thou resist not evil!" That is what the lovers of God say. Whatever the world does, wherever it goes, has no influence [on them].

This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.

Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.

But success and failure are of no account. They are God's concern, not mine.

When one has love for God, one doesn't feel any physical attraction to wife, children, relatives and friends. One retains only compassion for them.

A soul disengaged from the world is a heavenly one; and then are we ready for heaven when our heart is there before us.

true weanedness from the world don't consist in being beat off from the world by the affliction of it, but a being drawn off by the sight of something better.

A lot of times in spiritual communities, detachment is considered to be an expression of being spiritually evolved when often, we have want and fear around being in relationship with each other.

If contempt of the world and heavenly affection is a necessary temper of christians, it is necessary that this temper appear in the whole course of their lives, in their manner of using the world, because it can have no place anywhere else.

Herein would I live; herein would I die; hereon would I dwell in my thoughts and affections; to the withering and consumption of all the painted beauties of this world, unto the crucifying all things here below, until they become unto me a dead and deformed thing, no way meet for affectionate embraces.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

My perspective is that you should be IN the world, but not OF the world.

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

Let no knowledge satisfy but that which lifts above the world, which weans from the world, which makes the world a footstool.

The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.

The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant.

I love acting. It's my playground; it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting. My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind.

In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.

somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.