“‘Surrender’ had always been a negative word for me—it meant losing or failing or giving up. But my burgeoning relationship with the ocean was exposing that my sense of control was actually an illusion. Surrender transformed from a weakness word to an infinite power concept. I had had a bias toward action—thrusting, pushing, striving, struggling, doing—and I began to realize that their opposites were equally as powerful—inaction, receptiveness, acceptance, non-resistance, being.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 387)
“You’re not trying to become non attached. You’re trying to move towards non attachment every time you get scared of a loss. For most people, they’ve never been non attached for one second in their whole life. So even the fact that they can move towards that is helpful for them. So the goal is not to become completely non attached. No. It’s work towards no one person, place, or thing leaving you can completely take away your whole existence and your sense of wholeness.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“The only time you’re going to really hold onto the past is when you haven’t fully learned from the past. When you have, you can apply those lessons to the present moment and create what you wanted to experience then.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 226)
“If we looked at ourselves closely and honestly, we would have to admit that the moment we enter our workspace or any group, we undergo a change. We easily slip into more primitive modes of thinking and behaving, without realizing it. Around others, we naturally tend to feel insecure as to what they think of us. We feel pressure to fit in, and to do so, we begin to shape our thoughts and beliefs to the group orthodoxies […] To resist this downward pull that groups inevitably exert on us, we must conduct a kind of experiment in human nature with a simple goal in mind—to develop the ability to detach ourselves from the group and create some mental space for true independent thinking.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 364)
“By throwing yourself into emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 104)
“Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it. Take any emotion—love for a women, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.”
Morrie Schwartz, via Tuesdays With Morrie (Page 104)