Salzberg found the actual problem
Most writing about mindfulness explains why presence is valuable, which almost nobody disputes. Sharon Salzberg’s line does something more useful: it identifies where the practice actually breaks. “Mindfulness is not difficult, we just need to remember to do it.” The failure is not one of skill or discipline or temperament. It is that the thought never arrives — you get to the end of an hour, or a day, without the option of being present ever having occurred to you. That reframes the whole task from effort to reminder.
A third of this room is one man
Six of these eighteen lines are Thich Nhat Hanh's. That imbalance is reported rather than corrected, because the alternative would be to leave out the writer who did most to put this vocabulary into English in order to make a page look better balanced. He published on the subject for fifty years and wrote quotably, which is an unusual combination. The rest of the room runs from 1859 to 2010 — a hundred and fifty years, and almost all of it after the idea reached the West.
What is a good quote about being present?
Thich Nhat Hanh’s “the present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.” It answers the usual objection — that being present means giving up on the future — by pointing out that the present is where the future is entered from.
What is the difference between mindfulness and relaxation?
Relaxation is a state you are trying to reach; mindfulness is noticing whatever state you are already in. They are often confused because one sometimes follows the other, but a mindful moment can be perfectly uncomfortable and still be mindful.
Did Lao Tzu say “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you ar…”?
Not Lao Tzu, and not ancient. The earliest known form is in Days of Healing, Days of Joy (1987), a book of recovery meditations, credited there only to “Jimmy R.” It reads: “When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future. When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past.” It is filed here as attributed to Lao Tzu, which means widely credited and not traced to a primary source.