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"They had long ago found out that one could not be an owner unless one were cold."
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Exlpore more Detachment quotes
"The practice of Detachment encourages the positive aspects of your life to become dominant, while providing a clear path for the negative aspects to recede."
"Having less worries is what allows me to talk to beggars in the street or tell jokes at waitresses and try to make them smile. I couldn't do that before, when I had a job and was always worried about money."
"It must be frustrating to survive the gauntlet that is our western medical schooling system only to one day come to the realization that you have been taught only to manage illness and disease instead of curing it."
"No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by."
"To be free of insistence [free of forcing one's own opinion] is the path of Vitragta [attachment-free state, the enlightened one]. Quit insisting at all places. To even insist on the truth, God has considered it as ignorance. There is no insistence in 'Us' whatsoever!"
"I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms."It was the most important night of my life," he said calmly. "It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most.""Which is?""To live without thinking."
"You should live in the world but remain untouched by it."
"I never have been involved in politics."
"If they weren't good for you in 2015, they won't be great for you in 2016. Let them go."
"After getting respect, one will get an equal amount of insult, if not in this life then the next. If you taste even the slightest of pleasure from this body-complex [pudgal], you will have to pay back an equivalent amount. Therefore become attachment-free (vitarag)."
Explore more quotes by John Steinbeck
"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
"But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there."
"...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."
"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard."
"We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way."
"Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew-that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
"I always found in myself a dread of west and love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains."
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