There are hundreds of “quote of the day” pages and almost none of them tell you where the quote came from. This one is built so that the answer is always the same: the verse number, the chapter, and the Pali.

Today’s verse

The verse of the day is on its own page, and it is the same verse for every reader on the same UTC date:

How the rotation works

The Dhammapada has 423 verses, and this site walks through them in book order, one per day, starting at verse 1 on 27 October 2026 and wrapping back to the beginning after verse 423 — roughly fourteen months per cycle.

That is a deliberate choice, and it produces something different from the usual random quote app:

  • You read the book, not a shuffle. Consecutive days give you consecutive verses, so paired verses stay paired — verses 3 and 4 are the same sentence twice, and splitting them across two days would break the only argument in the passage.
  • Every reader is on the same verse. No personalisation means a verse can be discussed, quoted and shared on the day, without anyone having to say which one they got.
  • The archive is stable. A given date maps to a given verse permanently, so a link to “today’s verse” keeps meaning what it meant.

Random is also available, if that is what you want — the random verse tool draws from the whole book without repeats until the round is spent. Keeping the two modes separate is the point: a daily reading and a shuffle are different practices.

Why verse order rather than a “best of”

An anthology of famous verses would run out in a month, and it would concentrate on chapter 1 — which is genuinely the most quotable part of the book, and also the part where a reader is most likely to stop. Book order takes you through the chapters on old age, on craving and on the mendicant, which almost never appear in quote collections because their verses are long and unsettled rather than aphoristic.

If you would rather read by subject, the verse index lists all 26 chapters, and the theme pages collect verses across chapters.

What “Buddhist quote” means here

It means a verse of the Dhammapada in Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation, released CC0 through SuttaCentral. Nothing on this site is a quote from a modern teacher, a paraphrase, or a line attributed to the Buddha without a source. The fake Buddha quotes page explains how the other kind circulates and how to spot it.

Using the daily verse

Each day’s verse has a page with the Pali, the chapter it sits in, adjacent verses, and two download buttons — a 1080×1080 square and a 1080×1920 phone wallpaper, drawn in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.

If you want the whole book rather than one verse a day, the complete text has all 423 verses on a single page with a print stylesheet.