The sentence is Thích Nhất Hạnh’s, and it can be pinned to a page. In No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life (Riverhead Books, 2002), in a section headed “The Only Moment We Can Be Alive,” he writes: “But life is available only in the present moment. The Buddha said, ‘It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have.’” That is page 99 — and it is the whole origin. He offers no sutta, no chapter, no citation; the quotation marks are doing all the work. No Pali text contains the sentence, and Wikiquote’s Gautama Buddha page ↗ does not carry it in any section.
“It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have” Not the Buddha. "It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have." was written by Thich Nhat Hanh in No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), p. 99, where he presents it in quotation marks as something the Buddha said, without citing any discourse. No Pali source contains the sentence. Traced by Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Gautama Buddha. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of Thích Nhất Hạnh — Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist. Theme: "It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Page 99, and the quotation marks that started it
Source
No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
Author and imprint
Thích Nhất Hạnh · New York: Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) · first hardcover August 2002
Location
Page 99, in the section “The Only Moment We Can Be Alive”
In the Pali Canon
Not found. Absent from Wikiquote’s Gautama Buddha page in every section, including Misattributed.
But life is available only in the present moment. The Buddha said, “It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have.” When you come back to the here and the now, you will recognize the many conditions of happiness that already exist.
No Death, No Fear (2002), p. 99
This is the earliest appearance located, and it is already in quotation marks. That is the mechanism in a single sentence: a revered teacher summarising a doctrine in his own warm, plain English, marking it as the Buddha’s speech because the teaching is the Buddha’s — and readers reasonably taking the marks to mean a text exists behind them.
Downloaded and searched the full text of No Death, No Fear on the Internet Archive ↗. The sentence appears once, on page 99, introduced by “The Buddha said,” with no citation of any discourse.
Fetched the raw wikitext of Wikiquote’s Gautama Buddha page ↗ and searched every section — Pali Canon, Mahayana, Miscellaneous and Misattributed. Neither this sentence nor the phrase “only moment we have” occurs anywhere on it.
Checked the Wikiquote page for Thích Nhất Hạnh ↗ too. The sentence is not listed there either, which is why the book itself — rather than a quotation site — is the source cited on this page.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How a teacher’s paraphrase became scripture
This is an unusually clean case, because the moment of transmission survives in print. The sentence did not drift out of an old translation — it was born already wearing quotation marks, on a page of a bestseller.
✕
The credit in circulationGautama Buddha Not in any canonical text
The sentence occurs nowhere in Wikiquote’s Gautama Buddha page ↗ — not in its Pali Canon or Mahayana sections, and not among the misattributions it already tracks.
✓
The actual authorThích Nhất Hạnh, 2002 The documented source
No Death, No Fear ↗, p. 99: “The Buddha said, ‘It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have.’” No discourse is named.
✕
Why it is not a forgeryThe teaching itself Faithful in substance
Nhất Hạnh was compressing a genuine and central Buddhist emphasis on the present moment into one plain English line. The doctrine is real; what is not real is the idea that a text exists in which the Buddha says this.
✓Quote it as his — it is a good sentence and he wrote it. Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Death, No Fear ↗ (Riverhead, 2002), p. 99.
Context
Why the Buddha attracts sentences he never said
The Buddha is among the most quoted people who ever lived and among the least quotable in the strict sense: the discourses attributed to him were preserved orally for centuries before being written down, and reach English readers through translations that are repetitive, formulaic and formal. Almost nothing in the Pali Canon sounds like a fridge magnet.
So the lines that circulate under his name are usually somebody else’s English — a translator’s, an interpreter’s, or a modern teacher’s. Thích Nhất Hạnh is the single most productive source of them, not because he was careless but because he was extraordinarily good at it. He spent sixty years turning Buddhist doctrine into calm, plain, memorable English. Sentences that good do not stay anonymous; they get promoted to scripture.
It was born already wearing quotation marks — on page 99 of a 2002 bestseller.
A note on how honest this actually is
It would be unfair to call this a fabrication. Within the tradition Nhất Hạnh wrote in, rendering the Buddha’s teaching in one’s own words and presenting it as the Buddha’s is ordinary practice — the point is fidelity to the doctrine, not to a manuscript. The problem arises only when the sentence leaves that context and enters a world where quotation marks are taken as a claim about a document.
The practical consequence is small but real: readers who go looking for this line in a sutta will not find it, and quotation sites that file it under “Buddha” are asserting something no text supports. Filing it under Thích Nhất Hạnh costs nothing and is true.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1926–2022 · Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist
Thích Nhất Hạnh — born Nguyễn Xuân Bảo in Huế, Vietnam, in 1926 — was a Thiền Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist who became one of the most widely read Buddhist writers in the English language. Exiled from South Vietnam in 1966 for refusing to take a side in the war, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr. the following year, founded the Plum Village monastery in southwest France in 1982, and is credited with coining the term “engaged Buddhism.” His gift was rendering Buddhist teaching in plain, warm English — which is precisely why so many sentences that are his now circulate under the Buddha’s name.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), 99 — where the sentence appears in quotation marks, introduced as something “the Buddha said,” with no discourse cited. No corresponding passage has been located in the Pali Canon.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have’?” Last verified 20 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-possible-to-live-happily-in-the-present-moment-it-is/