Henepola Gunaratana Quotes

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

No expectations. Ask nothing, expect nothing and accept everything, and life is very well.

When one, abandoning greed, feels no greed for what would merit greed, greed gets shed from him - like a drop of water from a lotus leaf.

"What is the secret of your serenity?" Said the master: "Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable."

When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

The only way to happiness is never to give happiness a thought.

All you realy need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.

The real secret of an unsatisfied life lies too often in an unsurrendered will.

Accept everything just the way it is.

When you accept what is, you are grateful for whatever situation arises.

What would it be like to let go of wanting things to be other than they are?

I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I'm done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what's really going on here. That usually softens things.

Right now, and in every now-moment, you are either closing or opening. You are either stressfully waiting for something - more money, security, affection - or you are living from your deep heart, opening as the entire moment, and giving what you most deeply desire to give, without waiting.

I used to say... 'Don't sweat the small stuff - not even the big stuff.' At the end of the day, none of it matters but your own joy, your own spiritual journey that you go on, God, your loved ones, your friends, your animals. These are the things you've got to cherish and love and embrace.

Looking for happiness is a sure way to sadness, I think. You have to take each moment as it comes.

The happiness we seek cannot be found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It cannot be found through getting serious and uptight about wanting things to go in the direction we think will bring happiness. We are always taking hold of the wrong end of the stick. The point is that the happiness we seek is already here and it will be found through relaxation and letting go rather than through struggle.

The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

People who want to rise above a well-cooked meal and a well-tailored garment, are out of their spiritual minds.

Inner peace doesn't come from getting what we want, but from remembering who we are.

Without desire there is stillness, and the world settles by itself.