Buddha Quotes, Checked
What the Early Texts Say and What They Don't

Buddhism is a living religion with many traditions, and this page is not about any of them. It checks popular quotations against one of the oldest collections of the Buddha’s teachings, the discourses preserved in Pali. (Parallel early collections survive in Chinese translation.) Even those, Mark Siderits notes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, are “texts that were not written down until several centuries after his death”, though they “were probably rehearsed shortly after his death and preserved through oral transmission”, and his dates are uncertain: “Up until recently his dates were thought to be approximately 560–480 BCE, but many scholars now hold that he must have died around 405 BCE.” So “the Buddha said” here means “the early texts have the Buddha say”.

We quote Bhikkhu Sujato’s English translations on SuttaCentral, which are released into the public domain, F. Max Müller’s 1881 translation of the Dhammapada, and, briefly, Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translations on Access to Insight. To check whether a line is in the early texts, we searched the whole of Sujato’s English translation of the discourses, from the four main collections to the Dhammapada and Sutta Nipāta. That tells us whether the words are there, not whether the idea is, so each “not found” below comes with the nearest real passage.

1. “Buddhism teaches that life is suffering”

Partly true Traditionally the first teaching, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11), does say, in Sujato’s translation, “Now this is the noble truth of suffering”, and “In brief, the five grasping aggregates are suffering.” But it is the first of four truths: suffering, its origin in craving, its cessation, and “the practice that leads to the cessation of suffering”, the eightfold path of “right view, right purpose, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right immersion.”

The same discourse opens with the “middle way” between two extremes: “Indulgence in sensual pleasures, which is low, crude, ordinary, ignoble, and pointless. And indulgence in self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, and pointless.”

The key word is dukkha, and translators do not agree on it. Sujato writes “suffering”, Thanissaro “stress”, and Müller, in the Dhammapada, “pain”. Siderits explains that “‘suffering’ is understood to mean not mere pain but existential suffering”, and that the first truth is “not the implausible claim that all of life’s states and events are necessarily experienced as unsatisfactory”.

2. “The Buddha taught that there is no self”

Disputed The text is clear; its meaning is argued. In the discourse on “not-self” (Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.59), each part of a person is examined in turn: “Mendicants, form is not-self”, and the listener is taught to see each one as “This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self.” Whether that adds up to “there is no self” is what scholars disagree about. Siderits sets out both sides. Some scholars “(correctly) point out that the Buddha never categorically denies the existence of a self that transcends what is empirically given”, though he does deny that any part of a person is a self; others read the teaching as “not a bit of metaphysics, just some practical advice”. Against the first reading he records the objection that “all of classical Indian philosophy—Buddhist and orthodox alike—understood the Buddha to have denied the self tout court”, and he points out that both readings assume we can know what the Buddha thought “without relying on the understanding of his teachings developed in the subsequent Buddhist philosophical tradition”.

3. “What we think, we become”

Partly true It descends from a real verse, Dhammapada 1, but not in these words. In Müller’s 1881 translation: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” The verse goes on: “If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.” It is about intention shaping what you say and do, and what follows from it.

Müller’s reading was contested in his own lifetime. In his notes he records that the Pali scholar Childers came round to a different reading, and adds: “I therefore adhere to my original translation.” Modern translators begin the verse differently again: Sujato, “Intention is the leader of things”; Thanissaro, “Phenomena are preceded by the heart”.

4. “The mind is everything. What you think you become.”

Myth as a Buddha quote. Neither sentence is in Sujato’s translation of the early discourses, nor in Müller’s Dhammapada. The nearest real teaching is about habit, in Majjhima Nikāya 19: “Whatever a mendicant frequently thinks about and considers becomes their heart’s inclination.”

5. “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”

Partly true The wording is not in the early texts, but a verse in the Sutta Nipāta (4.14) says something close. In Sujato’s translation: “A mendicant would be settled internally, and not seek peace from another. For one at peace inside themselves, there’s no picking up, whence putting down?” It describes a mendicant, in a poem answering a question about “seclusion and the state of peace”.

6. “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal; you are the one who gets burned”

Partly true The idea is early; the hot coal is not. No discourse in Sujato’s translation of the early texts pairs coals with anger, but the idea that anger harms the angry person first is there. In Aṅguttara Nikāya 7.64, in Sujato’s translation: “Anger creates harm; anger upsets the mind”, and “when the anger is spent, they’re tormented as if burnt by fire”. The coal image itself comes from a much later Buddhist work, Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, which the Stanford Encyclopedia dates to the “fifth century CE”. In Pe Maung Tin’s English translation, a person reflecting on their own anger is told they are “like a man who seizes with both hands glowing live coals or dung in order to strike another man therewith”, but who is burned and soiled first. Buddhaghosa then applies a second image to the other person’s anger and cites a verse of the Buddha for it, a verse also found in the Dhammapada (125), where the evil “backfires on the fool, like fine dust thrown upwind”.

For what the early texts do say about grudges, see Dhammapada 3 and 4, in Sujato’s translation: “For those who bear such a grudge, hatred is never laid to rest.”

7. “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth”

Partly true A real discourse lies behind it, Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.131, but the popular line changes its words and its point. The discourse lists three things “conveyed under cover” and three that “dazzle in the open”: “The moon dazzles in the open, not under cover. The sun dazzles in the open, not under cover.” The third is not “the truth” but “The teaching and training proclaimed by a Realized One”. Nothing is said about how long anything stays hidden.

8. “You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection”

Myth as a Buddha quote. It is not in the early discourses as translated. There is a real discourse about holding oneself dear (Saṃyutta Nikāya 3.8), and it draws a different conclusion. In Sujato’s translation: “Having explored every quarter with the mind, one finds no one dearer than oneself. Likewise for others, each holds themselves dear; so one who desires self-knowledge would harm no other.”

9. “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, unless it agrees with your own reason”

Partly true It comes from a real discourse, Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.65, often called the Kālāma Sutta, where the Kālāmas, confused by rival teachers, ask whom to believe. The Buddha tells them not to go by tradition, scripture or a teacher’s standing: “don’t go by testament, don’t go by canonical authority, don’t rely on logic, don’t rely on inference”. So logic and inference are on the list of things not to go by, the opposite of “your own reason”. The text does then say “when you know for yourselves”, but what you are to know is whether things are “unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by sensible people”, and lead “to harm and suffering”. “Even if I have said it” has no clear counterpart in the text.

10. “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future”

Partly true This is a fair gist of a real verse, the opening of Majjhima Nikāya 131. In Sujato’s translation: “Don’t run back to the past, don’t anticipate the future. What’s past is left behind, the future has not arrived”. The verse does ask for clear seeing of “any present phenomenon”, but it goes on with an urgency the popular version drops: “Today’s the day to keenly work— who knows, tomorrow may bring death!”

11. “Hatred is never ended by hatred”

True It is Dhammapada 5. In Müller’s translation: “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.” Sujato: “For never is hatred laid to rest by hate, it’s laid to rest by love: this is an ancient teaching.” The Pali word translated “love” here, avera, is literally non-hatred (our gloss); Thanissaro renders the line “Hostilities are stilled through non-hostility”.

Our reading

Most of the misattributed quotes here have something in common: they are about you. They promise that your thoughts shape reality, that you deserve your own love, that your own reason is the final test. The early texts are usually pointing the other way: at intention and action, at not harming others, at seeing that the things you call “mine” are not you. The real lines are less comforting and more interesting. When a Buddha quote comes without a text and a number, it is worth asking where it is from.

Sources

• Bhikkhu Sujato, translations of Saṃyutta Nikāya 3.8, 22.59 and 56.11; Majjhima Nikāya 19 and 131; Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.65, 3.131 and 7.64; Dhammapada 1–20 and 125; Sutta Nipāta 4.14, SuttaCentral (public domain), with the Pali texts.
• F. Max Müller, trans., The Dhammapada, Sacred Books of the East vol. 10 (Oxford, 1881), Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive.
• Thanissaro Bhikkhu, translations of Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11 and Dhammapada 1, Access to Insight.
• Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purity (Visuddhimagga), Part II, trans. Pe Maung Tin, Pali Text Society, Internet Archive.
• Mark Siderits, “Buddha”, and Noa Ronkin, “Abhidharma”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Checked September 2026.

Related: Did They Really Say That? · Laozi and the Tao Te Ching · Stoicism vs Mindfulness