Quotes about attachment
page 2

“Due to attachment, anger, and foolishness, I have committed numberless mistakes in speech, deed and thought. I bow my head and repent. I vow from today to begin anew, to live day and night in mindfulness, and not to repeat my previous mistakes.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Anger, Night

“I don’t like your hair black. (Artemis)
And I don’t like your head attached to your shoulders. Guess we can’t all have what we want, huh? (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Reality

“A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

“I guess I just don't get the point. It's like, why should you bother getting attached to anything if,

A: It's never gonna last, and
B: It hurts like hell when it's over?”

Alyson Nöel (1965) writer

Hell, Hurt

“Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.”

Ben Fountain book Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Source: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Way, Country

“When bad fortune occurs, the unresourceful, unimaginative man looks about him to attach the blame to someone else; the resolute accepts misfortune and endeavors to survive, mature, and improve because of it.”

Anne McCaffrey Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

Source: Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern 1983

“Thought = creation. If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad) that speeds the creation”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Speed

“Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.”

Idries Shah (1924–1996) writer and Sufi teacher

Source: Sufi Thought and Action

People, Pleasure, World, Suffering

“I’m not attached to anything.
I’m attached to what it feels it's my duty, to do my duty.
I think that I will die with the boots on.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Feeling, Thinking

“Never become attached to anything that continues to hurt God. For you to be free of it, God must be allowed to hurt whatever it may be.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

Source: My Utmost for his Highest

God, Hurt

“I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith…. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Faith

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: The Educated Imagination

Imagination, Cats, Literature, Hell

“Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Suffering

“Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Fear, Jealousy, Training

“A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear to touch you.
The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear.

No date. No name attached.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Feeling, Time

“What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of
attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Life, Learning

“Until we can receive with an open heart, we're never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Help, Heart

“It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

People

“An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better.”

René Magritte (1898–1967) Belgian surrealist artist

“When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: Return to Love

Love, Money, Cars, Search

“No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

World, Reality

“I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Source: Images: My Life in Film

“Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

“Don't get too attached to anything.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Sad

“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

Love, World, Soul

“It was only when Shona, in sheer fury, turned the carnivorous sheep among them that they moved. They ran, some of them with charming little white sheep attached to their legs or backsides and the rest shouting about monsters.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Dark Lord of Derkholm

Source: Dark Lord of Derkholm

“… You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

People, Hope, Thinking

“I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 40, The Rat Who Wound the Clock

Pain, Light, Suffering, Summer

“Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Variant: Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous. They assume vague, amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.
Source: Nausea

Time, Forgetting

“All of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Fate

Source: Fool's Fate

Life, Personality

“You will tell me what you know now," he said.

"Or?"

He said nothing, so I elaborated. "See, this kind of threat usually has an 'or' attached to it. Or an 'and'. 'Tell me and I'll allow you to live' or something like that.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

“Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

People, Wealth

“Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

Time

“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Feeling

“Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself… know what you want.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

“We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

World

“I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.”

Colette book The Pure and the Impure

Source: The Pure and the Impure

People

“Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself:. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”

Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace

Source: Alias Grace

Flowers, Strong, Night, Dead

“Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.”

“Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

Source: Gone With the Wind

Money, World, Penalty, Loneliness

“It had been a whim, and there was nothing Magnus attached more importance to than a whim.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Runaway Queen

“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Life, Fear, Loss

“There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.”

Michael Ondaatje The Cat's Table

Source: The Cat's Table

Life, Way

“A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

“This is the hard part about having best friends that I feel no attachment to -- I don't give them any benefit of the doubt. And being best friends is always about the benefit of the doubt.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Feeling, Parting

“The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

The Taming of the Screw (1983)
Source: The Taming of the Screw: How to Sidestep Several Million Homeowner's Problems

Box

“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: On Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.”

Gregory Maguire book A Lion Among Men

Source: A Lion Among Men

Family, Beauty

“Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.”

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

Winter, Past

“She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.”

Jane Austen book Love and Freindship

Source: Love and Friendship

Time, Sincerity

“It was becoming clear to me that I shouldn't bother to get too attached to anything. Turn your back and you lose it. Just like that.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

“The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Idea

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

World

“Sometimes, we are so attached to our way of life that we turn down wonderful opportunities simply because we don't know what to do with it.”

Paulo Coelho book Like the Flowing River

Source: Like the Flowing River

Life, Way

“He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Love, People, Nature, Strong

“Wayne's a little attached to that hat," Waxillium said. "He thinks it's lucky."
Wayne: "It is lucky. I ain't never died while wearing that hat."
Marasi frowned. "I… I'm not sure I know how to respond."
Wax: "That's a common reaction to Wayne.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Alloy of Law

Thinking

“Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

“Then you've made the only choice. But there's a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It's loneliness.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

Penalty, Loneliness

“As soon as a manhas his guard up. he will not fall in love or get attached the only way he'll get attached is if you lower his guard first.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart

Love, Way

“Patriotism in the female s*x is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. Even in the freest countries our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the laws have given a sovereign authority. Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Adams (17 June 1782)

Age, Law, Sex, History

“The secret of action is to get established in equanimity, renouncing all egocentric attachments, and forgetting to worry over our successes and failures.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Secret, Failure, Success, Forgetting

“The word " economy" has latterly been used in various senses; the Germans give it a very indefinite signification.
Judging from its etymology and original signification, the Greeks seem to have understood by it the establishment and direction of the menage, or domestic arrangements.
Xenophon, in his work on economy, treats of domestic management, the reciprocal duties of the members of a family and of those who compose the household; and only incidentally mentions agriculture as having relation to domestic affairs. This word is never applied to agriculture by Xenophon, nor, indeed, by any Greek author; they distinguish it by the terms, georgic geoponic.
The Romans give a very extensive and indefinite signification to the word "economy." They understand by it, the best method of attaining the aim and end of some particular thing; or the disposition, plan, and division of some particular work. Thus, Cicero speaks of oeconomia causae, oeconomia orationis; and by this he means the direction of a law process, the arrangement of an harangue. Several German authors use it in this sense when they speak of the oekonomie eines schauspiels, or eines gedichtes, the economy of a play or poem. Authors of other nations have adopted all the significations which the Romans have attached to this word, and understand by it the relation of the various parts of any particular thing to each other and to the whole—that which we are accustomed to term the organization. The word "economy" only acquires a real sense when applied to some particular subject: thus, we hear of "the economy of nature," "the animal economy," and " the economy of the state" spoken of. It is also applied to some particular branch of science or industry; but, in the latter case, the nature of the economy ought to be pointed out, if it is not indicated by the nature of the subject.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section II. The Economy, Organization and Direction of an Agricultural Enterprise, p. 54-55.

Family, Law, Understanding, Nature

“One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990)

“The question we must ask ourselves as a culture is whether we want to embrace the change that must come, or resist it. Are we so attached to the dietary fallacies with which we were raised, so afraid to counter the arbitrary laws of eating taught to us in childhood by our misinformed parents, that we cannot alter the course they set us on, even if it leads to our own ruin? Does the prospect of standing apart or encountering ridicule scare us even from saving ourselves?”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 9: Going Home, p. 188

Law, Question, Parent, Change

“I'll very often just start humming my way through a scene. Say, OK the tempo should be about like this, it should pause here, it should pick up here. And very often I'll make up a little melody just to do that. About half of the little melodies in the score for Jonah are those little melodies that I made up just to use to kind of pace a scene and then we got kind of attached to them.”

Phil Vischer (1966) American puppeter

From Disc Two; The Music: The Score (00:00:17-00:00:38)
Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie DVD (2002)

Way

“The nature of the mind is to interpret non-essentials essential. The mind creates artificial needs, believing it cannot live without them. In this way we carry a great burden of attachments throughout our life. Attachment is itself a great burden on our minds. We may never understand the extent of the burden till we’re free of it. But if we find joy within, we can live a simple life, free of endless complications.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, Way, Understanding, Nature

“If "safeguards of individual liberty" do not have "any intrinsic worth", then neither does individual liberty. And if individual liberty has no intrinsic worth, neither does individual life. It is impossible to imagine a more complete denial of President Bush's proclamation of the sanctity of human life, or of his assertion of an "essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence." This is not only legal positivism, it is nihilism. It is not only a denial of any moral foundation of constitutionalism, it is a denial of any moral foundation of political community.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

Life, Imagination, Communication, Personality

“Congress was right in not limiting, by its reconstruction acts, the right of suffrage to whites; but wrong in the exclusion from suffrage of certain classes of citizens and all unable to take its prescribed retrospective oath, and wrong also in the establishment of despotic military governments for the States and in authorizing military commissions for the trial of civilians in time of peace. There should have been as little military government as possible; no military commissions; no classes excluded from suffrage; and no oath except one of faithful obedience and support to the Constitution and laws, and of sincere attachment to the constitutional Government of the United States.”

Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873) Chief Justice of the United States

Letter to August Belmont (May 30, 1868), in J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, (1874). p. 585.

Peace, Faith, Law, Support

“For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.”

Thomas Hardy book A Pair of Blue Eyes

A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), ch. 9

Love, Thinking, Passion

“The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

Life

“One thing one can't help noticing is the efficacy of religion before the nineteenth century at dealing with these problems and answering some of these unanswerable questions. By the time of the Great War, religion is practically dead. By the time of the Second World War, it's no help at all.
The chaplains that were attached to the infantry that I was in practically never did spiritual work because they knew they'd be ridiculed. What they did was to apply bandages and surgical scissors, assisting the medics and calming people down psychologically. But everybody recognized that religion was no help whatever.”

Paul Fussell (1924–2012) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Humanities interview (1996)

War, People, World, Religion

“Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them, and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you. (…) By the same power that brought you so far, that prompted your heart to desire truth and your mind to seek it. It is the same power that keeps you alive. You may call it Life or the Supreme.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Meditation
Source: "I am That." P.54.

Life, Truth, Help, Heart

“Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquid to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 210.

Love, Life, God, Nature

“Nothing is more stimulating and more salutary to (or for) the inner (or inward) development than the exemple of men devoted to the good. It is in the company of men pursuing a same ideal that the still weavering (or unsteady) soul can set oneself ("se fixer", Fr) and stick to (or attach to) everything that is noble and generous.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 58.

Men, Soul

“And my aim in my life is to make picture and drawings, as many and as well as I can, then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking: "Oh, pictures I might have made!" Theo, I declare I prefer to think how arms, legs, head are attached to the trunk, rather than whether I myself am or am not more or less an artist.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Autumn 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 338) p. 21 <br class="br">1880s, 1883

Love, Life, Hope, Thinking

“There is a process of slow modification and development mainly in directions which I view with misgiving. "Tory democracy," the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the Conservative party in which I was bred, than it is like Liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism … applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the old Conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests. The Liberalism of to-day is better … yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they called construction, — that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man. Both the one and the other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Acton (11 February 1885), quoted in The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III (1903) by John Morley, p. 172
1880s

Secret, Law, Way, Democracy

“I had this sense that ideas about democracy, theories of democracy which I had learned about of course from graduate school on, from Aristotle and Plato onward, that they were inadequate. I don’t want to diminish them; I have always retained a great respect for classical and medieval and eighteenth-century theory, but meanwhile a whole new kind of political system emerged to which the term democracy became attached, and for which democracy remained an ideal, even though classical democracy as an ideal was so far removed from reality. The gap between that ideal and the actual political institutions that had developed, particularly from about the sixteenth, seventeenth century on, was just enormous. And what we didn’t have enough of, had very little of, was an adequate description of what the actual institutions of so-called democracy, modern democracy, representative democracy, were.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

School, Democracy, Idea, Reality

“Attachment to spiritual things is… just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)
Misattributed

Love

“To those who doubt and deny the preponderance of good over evil in human nature; who think the few are made to rule, and the many to serve; who put rank above brotherhood, and race above humanity; who attach more importance to ancient forms than to the living realities of the present; who worship power in whatever hands it may be lodged and by whatever means it may have been obtained; our government is a mountain of sin, and, what is worse, it seems confirmed in its transgressions. One of the latest and most potent European prophets, one who felt himself called upon for a special deliverance concerning us and our destiny as a nation, was the late Thomas Carlyle. He described us as rushing to ruin, and when we may expect to reach the terrible end, our gloomy prophet, enveloped in the fogs of London, has not been pleased to tell us. Warning and advice from any quarter are not to be despised, and especially not from one so eminent as Mr. Carlyle; and yet Americans will find it hard to heed even men like him, while the animus is so apparent, bitter and perverse.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Mountain, Nature, Thinking

“On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

quote from 'Guerra sola igiene del mundo', in Edizione Futuriste di Poesia', Milan 1915; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 21
1910's

Death, Health, Youth, Art

“Perfect knowledge of the space an object should occupy in a picture, and of the space that separates one object from another, establishes a new astronomy of things attached to our planet by the magic law of gravity. Canons of the Metaphysical aesthetic lie in the minutely-accurate and precisely-estimated use of surfaces and volumes.... We are building in paint a new Metaphysical psychology of things.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 233
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Lie, Law, Knowledge, Painting

“All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people—the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.”

Rudyard Kipling Life's Handicap

The Mark of the Beast.
Life's Handicap (1891)

God, People, Personality

“By now it has become a formula to attach new ideas on the grounds of extremism and unintelligibility. Every phase of modern art has in turn been attacked on these grounds, until the new phase became acceptable. Although the present attacks are focused on those who emphasize the subjective side of abstract painting, the threat to other sections of the modern painting is implicit. The attacks are always focused on those who are considered the black sheep, for reasons of non-conformity. They are conspicuous, because they are different, and therefore may be easy targets.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Gottlieb's comment on the attacks on artistic freedom in the United States, 1948
Quote from Gottlieb's lecture at Forum: the Artist Speaks, museum of Modern Art, New York, May 5, 1948.
1940s

Art, Idea, Freedom, Painting

“Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Horatio G. Spafford (17 March 1814)
1810s

Strong, Drawing, Country

“It was a great pleasure to make a movie again. Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming.”

Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999) American politician

as quoted in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson, page 689, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003, ISBN 0-375-41128-3.

Pleasure, Dreams

“Ordinarily the enjoyment of sensual pleasures is the highest and only happiness of the average man. There is no doubt a kind of momentary happiness in the anticipation, gratification and retrospection of such fleeting material pleasures, but they are illusive and temporary. According to the Buddha non-attachment is a greater bliss.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Pleasure, Happiness

“The transportation bill had over $5 billion worth of special local projects and favors attached to it, lamprey-like, by various congresspersons. But this is good, because these projects will CREATE JOBS. See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Column for week of February 29, 1992 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=HgBOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=5osDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5149,5086013&dq=dave-barry+pie+bake&hl=en <br class="br">Columns and articles

Money, God

“The revolutionary can have no friendship or attachment, except for those who have proved by their actions that they, like him, are dedicated to revolution.”

Sergey Nechayev book Catechism of a Revolutionary

Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869)

Friendship

“Lots of artists who paint have that experience to one degree or another, this release where their thinking doesn't precede their doing. The space is shortened between thinking and doing. It's a funny thing, what I really hate, yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on, and it's so boring to put paint on and to see yourself putting paint on. You're really preparing for those few hours where some kind of umbilical cord is attached between you and it. You do it and the work is done and this cord seems to slacken, as if you left yourself there. And what a relief to leave yourself somewhere, to get out of it entirely.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 68

Hate, Thinking, Painting

“I don't feel that attached to my instruments. It's almost like I'm going to dominate them in some sort of way. I don't feel like they're part of me; they stand between me and something new.”

The Edge (1961) Irish rock musician, guitar player of U2

On being a musician

Way, Feeling, Parting

“I had long believed that the Heath aberration of authoritarian centralist corporatism apart, most of the values, ethos and policies of Conservatism were strongly supported by working-class voters. Those voters—especially the socio-economic groups C1 and C2—I saw as natural Conservatives who nevertheless saw themselves for tribal reasons as Labour voters. However much we tried to reach them by argument, we always failed because they were unable to identify themselves with the representatives of the Tory Party they saw. I was determined to be a Conservative who spoke their language, not just what is often described as my flat North-London accent—which was after all my mother tongue—but their practical realism, lack of humbug and strong attachment to many traditional standards and values.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Norman Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile (Futura, 1991), p. 172.

Support, Nature, Strong

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

Life, People, World, Sadness

“Thus the more readily we accept grief, the deeper in us the awakening of the love which is not attachment but a positive serenity, pure and full of faith, the infinite in a loving act, even though in bitterness and tears.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Love, Faith, Tear

“Mr. Gladstone's Doctrine which the Observer praised that every sane man has a moral Right to vote goes straight to universal suffrage which not even the most vehement Reformer has hitherto advocated. Moreover if every sane Man has that Right why does it not also belong to every sane woman Who is equally affected by Legislation and Taxation. The Truth is that a vote is not a Right but a Trust. All the Nation cannot by Possibility be brought together to vote and therefore a Selected few are appointed by Law to perform this Function for the Rest and the Publicity attached to the Performance of this Trust is a Security that it will be responsibly performed.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Charles Barrington (15 May 1864), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 565.
1860s

Truth, Law, Universe

“The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact — that mystery of mysteries — the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

Charles Darwin book The Voyage of the Beagle

Source: The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), chapter XVII: "Galapagos Archipelago" (second edition, 1845), entry for 8 October 1835, pages 377-378 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=390&itemID=F14&viewtype=image

World, Feeling, History, Nature

“He who is void of virtuous Attachments in private Life, is, or very soon will be void of all Regard for his Country. There is seldom an Instance of a Man guilty of betraying his Country, who had not before lost the Feeling of moral Obligations in his private Connections.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Letter to James Warren (4 November 1775) http://books.google.com/books?vid=LCCN04018620&id=GVjNVKLxYtgC&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=%22who+had+not+before+lost+the+feeling+of+moral+obligations+in+his+private+connections%22, reprinted in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, vol. III (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), p. 236

Life, Feeling, Country

“I learned I'm not the kind of artist that can just sing someone else's songs, for a lot of reasons. I have to have some sort of understanding of the song, or some sort of attachment to it.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

When asked what she learned from writing to her album
Attributed

Understanding, Learning, Singing

Quotes about attachment page 2

Quotes about attachment
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