Quotes about Detachment

They seemed disconnected, hollow somehow, deeply withdrawn.

Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached. I have always been detached (in part). Always.

was suspended in a place of no feeling,

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within.

It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.

Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

What remains is solitude.

To be suddenly alone when all you have ever known is connection. To be alone in the dark while you felt the distant pieces of yourself decay.

Solitude is separate experience.

To be isolated is always to assert oneself numerically; when you assert yourself as one, that is isolation.

Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?

nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness.