Henepola Gunaratana Quotes

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

This concept that you refer to in Buddhism is something I've been nurtured with through the history of my country for 700, 800 years - Persian poets and philosophers haven't said anything different with regard to experiencing life in the moment, as opposed to the belief of permanence.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

People don't realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.

It's a lot harder to find fault with the mundane details of daily existence when you really, really know on a cellular level that you're going to go, and that this moment, right now, is life. Life isn't what happens to you in 20 years. This moment, right now, is your life.

To the soul, there is no past and no future; all is, and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but there is really no such thing.

Nothing is guaranteed to last, so you should just enjoy it as it happens.

The present is a point just passed.

What I have learned over the years is to try to stay in the moment. I want to feel it all because I've realized nothing lasts.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The present will not long endure.

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

Since fame is an illusion and death is in our future all we have is the next moment before we are swallowed into oblivion.