Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. It’s so clear. Mindfulness is the energy and practice that helps you go back to the here and now so that you encounter life.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

When you hold the hand of a child, invest one hundred percent of yourself in the act of holding her hand. When you hug your partner, do the same. Forget everything else. Be totally present, totally alive in the act of hugging. This is the opposite of the way we’ve been trained to lead our lives and run our businesses. We’ve been taught to do many things at once. We answer an e-mail while we talk on the phone; while in a meeting for one project, we work on our notes for another project. Every new technology promises to help us do more things at once. Now we can send e-mail while listening to music, talking on the phone, and taking a picture, all with the same device. With your energy that dispersed, where is your power?

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Don’t wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow may be too late. If we know how to live according to the insight of impermanence, we will not make many mistakes. We can be happy right now. We can love our beloved, care for her, and make her happy today. And we won’t run toward the future, losing our life, which is available only in the present moment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be an excellent teacher.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives —the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Peace is based on respect for life, the spirit of reverence for life.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We wanted peace. We did not care about anyone’s victory or defeat. We just wanted the bombs to stop falling on us.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

When you understand, you cannot help but love. You cannot get angry.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Together with the patient, a therapist looks at the nature of the pain. Often, the therapist can uncover causes of suffering that stem from the way the patient looks at things, the beliefs he holds about himself, his culture, and the world. The therapist examines these viewpoints and beliefs with the patient, and together they help free him from the kind of prison he has been in. But the patient’s efforts are crucial. A teacher has to give birth to the teacher within his student, and a psychotherapist has to give birth to the psychotherapist within his patient. The patient’s “internal psychotherapist” can then work full-time in a very effective way.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves “inside the skin” of the other.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We need the vision of interbeing—we belong to each other; we cannot cut reality into pieces. The well-being of “this” is the well-being of “that,” so we have to do things together. Every side is “our side”; there is no evil side.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindful observation is based on the principle of “non-duality”: our feeling is not separate from us or caused merely by something outside us; our feeling is us, and for the moment we are that feeling. We are neither drowned in nor terrorized by the feeling, nor do we reject it. Our attitude of not clinging to or rejecting our feelings is the attitude of letting go[.]

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

In the West, we are very goal oriented. We know where we want to go, and we are very directed in getting there. This may be useful, but often we forget to enjoy ourselves along the route.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We are too undemanding, too ready to watch whatever is on the screen, too lonely, lazy, or bored to create our own lives. We turn on the TV and leave it on, allowing someone else to guide us[.]

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Whether we are in the city, the countryside, or the wilderness, we need to sustain ourselves by choosing our surroundings carefully and nourishing our awareness in each moment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment[.]

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Practicing mindfulness enables us to become a real person. When we are a real person, we see real people around us, and life is present in all its richness.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We all exist as part of a wonderful stream of life.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A wave has a right to live her life as a wave, but she must also learn to live her life as water because she is not only a wave. She is also water. And water lives without the fear carried by the wave.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

In us, there is a river of feelings, in which every drop of water is a different feeling, and each feeling relies on all the others for its existence. To observe it, we just sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it surfaces, flows by, and disappears.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

[T]he flower is made of non-flower elements. We can describe the flower as being full of everything. There is nothing that is not present in the flower. We see sunshine, we see the rain, we see clouds, we see the earth, and we also see time and space in the flower.A flower, like everything else, is made entirely of non-flower elements. The whole cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest herself, The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity.The flower cannot be by herself alone. The flower has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud and everything in the cosmos. If we understand being in terms of inter-being, then we are much closer to the truth. Inter-being is not being and it is not non-being. Inter-being means being empty of a separate identity, empty of a separate self

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I am a continuation like the rain is the continuation of the cloud.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Things cannot stay the same because they are influenced by everything else, everything that is not itself.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Just because we do not perceive something, it is not correct to say it does not exist.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Impermanence means that everything changes and that nothing remains the same in any consecutive moments. And although things change every moment, they still cannot be accurately described as the same or as different from what they were a moment ago.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Emptiness is not the opposite of existence. It is not nothingness or annihilation.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Direct experience is the only way.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

When you lose a loved one, you suffer. But if you know how to look deeply, you have a chance to realize that his or her nature is truly the nature of no birth, no death. There is manifestation and there is the cessation of manifestation in order to have another manifestation. You have to be very keen and very alert in order to recognize the new manifestations of just one person.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Many of us live like dead people because we live without awareness. We carry our dead bodies with us and circulate throughout the world. We are pulled into the past or we are pulled forward into the future or we are caught by our projects or our despair and anger. We are not truly alive, we are not inhabited by awareness of the miracle of being alive.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Nourish yourself every day with the wonderful things that life has to offer you. Nourish yourself in the present moment. Walk in the kingdom of God.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We can only accept teachings that we have put into practice with our own awakened understanding and that we can see with our own experience to be true.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Don't chase after your thoughts as a shadow follows its object. Don't run after your thoughts. Find joy and peace in this very moment .

~ Thich Nhat Hanh