Top 60 Henepola Gunaratana Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don’t have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

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2. “The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

3. “Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

4. “View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don’t run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

5. “But look within and watch the stuff coming up-restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain-just watch it come up and don’t get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

6. “When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion for others is automatic.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

7. “The you that goes in one side of the meditation experience is not the same you that comes out the other side.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

8. “The principal cause of suffering is craving. Once craving is eliminated, much suffering will be eliminated. Still more suffering will be eliminated once ignorance is eliminated. Both craving and ignorance are equally powerful defilements that cause suffering.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

9. “You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that changes will flow naturally.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

10. “You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

11. “Meditation changes your character.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

12. “The brain does not manufacture thoughts unless we stimulate it with habitual verbalizing. When we train ourselves by constant practice to stop verbalizing, the brain can experience things as they are.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

13. “Don’t cling to anything and don’t reject anything.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

14. “You can only have bliss if you don’t chase it.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

15. “You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

16. “The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

17. “We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. In the long run avoiding unpleasantness is a very unkind thing to do to yourself.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

18. “Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

19. “No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way, and you just never noticed.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

20. “Peace is not a thought, not a concept; it is a nonverbal experience.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

21. “By silencing the mind, we can experience real peace. As long as various kinds of thoughts agitate the brain, we don’t experience 100 percent peace.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

22. “The purpose of meditation is personal transformation.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

23. “Watch the functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you can gain insight into your own behavior.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

24. “Vipassana: looking into something with clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct, piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

25. “Discipline is a difficult word for most of us. It conjures up images of somebody standing over you with a stick, telling you that you’re wrong. But self-discipline is different. It’s the skill of seeing through the hollow shouting of your own impulses and piercing their secret.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

26. “Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

27. “Whatever attitudes we habitually use toward ourselves, we will use on others, and whatever attitudes we habitually use toward others, we will use on ourselves.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

28. “Distractions are really paper tigers. They have no power of their own. They need to be fed constantly, or else they die. If you refuse to feed them by your own fear, anger, and greed, they fade.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

29. “Let come what comes, and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal, and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

30. “No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

31. “Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. Pain and suffering are two different animals.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

32. “You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option. You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

33. “Each step along the Buddha’s path to happiness requires practising mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

34. “Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

35. “Civilization changes man on the outside. Meditation softens him within, through and through.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

36. “Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and helpless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

37. “Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

38. “What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now. The consequences of an evil mind will follow you like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. The consequences of a purified mind will follow you like your own shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind – no parent, no relative, no friend, no one. A well-disciplined mind brings happiness.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

39. “We can’t examine our own depression without accepting it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation, frustration, and all those other uncomfortable emotional states. You can’t examine something fully if you are busy rejecting its existence.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

40. “VIPASSANA MEDITATION is something of a mental balancing act. You are going to be cultivating two separate qualities of the mind – mindfulness and concentration.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

41. “Generally, the last hindrance to leave the mind is hatred. When it is gone, metta arises naturally. The void is filled with feelings of friendliness toward everyone. When you no longer push things away, you naturally feel close to everything. You feel positive toward everybody. Everybody is your friend.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

42. “The reason we are all stuck in life’s mud is that we ceaselessly run from our problems and after our desires. Meditation provides us with a laboratory situation in which we can examine this syndrome and devise strategies for dealing with it.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

43. “Vipassana meditation is a process by which that concept is dissolved. Little by little, you chip away at it, just by observing it.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

44. “Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

45. “Mindfulness is our emergency kit, readily available at any time. When we face a situation in which we feel indignation, if we mindfully investigate our own mind, we will discover bitter truths about ourselves: for example, that we are selfish; we are egocentric; we are attached to our ego; we hold on to our opinions; we think we are right and everybody else is wrong; we are prejudiced; we are biased; and at the bottom of all of this, we do not really love ourselves.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

46. “Meditation changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply aware of your own thoughts, words, and deeds.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

47. “In order to give your mind a little rest, you need to “forget” things deliberately from time to time. This is like draining all the energy from your batteries in order to fully recharge them. When you drain all the energy from the battery of your electronic device and recharge it, the battery lasts longer. Give some rest to your mind. Cease to think about all those duties and responsibilities for a little while.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

48. “The crucial thing is to be mindful of what is occurring, not to control what is occurring.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

49. “Advanced meditators are generally found to be pretty jovial people. They possess one of the most valuable of all human treasures, a sense of humor.”

— Henepola Gunaratana

50. “Skillful thoughts, on the other hand, are those connected with generosity, compassion, and wisdom. They are skillful in the sense that they may be used as specific remedies for unskillful thoughts, and thus can assist you in moving toward liberation. You.”

— Henepola Gunaratana