Bill Clegg Quotes

To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.

Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains.

I saw that nothing was permanent. You don't want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.

I lost a company. So what? It's just stuff. Can't take it with you.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

I am aware of the depths of heartache I'm experiencing but also how foolish it is to think that the things we have are permanent. They're not.

You get so close to your own music that you can't see the beauty in it. I had to learn to let go. It's good to be less precious.

My motto is never to hold on to anything. I accept and then let go: not just the negatives, but the praise, too. Or it'll get to my head.

Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.

Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile.

Life is a flux, nothing abides. Still we are such fools, we go on clinging. If change is the nature of life, then clinging is stupidity, because your clinging is not going to change the law of life. Your clinging is only going to make you miserable. Things are bound to change; whether you cling or not does not matter. If you cling you become miserable: you cling and they change, you feel frustrated. If you don't cling they still change, but then there is no frustration because you were perfectly aware that they are bound to change. This is how things are, this is the suchness of life.

Nothing belongs to me. Everything comes and goes. Serenity is an open door.

Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value. You then continue to meet people, to be involved in experience and activities, but without the wants and fears of the egoic self. That is to say, you no longer demand that a situation, person, place, or event should satisfy you or make you happy. It's passing and imperfect nature is allowed to be.

At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving; this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.

If you see things as in eternity, you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the more easily not to clutch at them as they pass... you learn to be reverent and not proudly possessive.

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

Don't get attached to anything.

Do not get attatched to the world as it is. Because the world is changing something new is coming.

I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.

Don't get too attached to anything.

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.

I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.