Thich Nhat Hanh

"That is why I don't believe much in what Mr. Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am." I think, therefore I'm lost in my thinking. I'm not there."

"When you touch someone who authentically represents a tradition, you not only touch his or her tradition, you also touch your own."

"Suffering has many faces. If we discover the roots of one suffering, we are at the same time discovering the roots of others."

"When we're inspired by the desire to practice and transform our suffering, the mind of the moment is very beautiful. Sometimes we call it the mind of love. It's because of love that we practice."

"We tend to think of nourishment only as what we take in through our mouths, but what we consume with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, and our bodies is also food. The conversations going on around us, and those we participate in, are also food. Are we consuming and creating the kind of food that is healthy for us and helps us grow?"

"So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person."

"Compassion is a verb."

"Understanding is the other name of love. If you don’t understand, you can’t love."

"The person who suffers most in this world is the person who has many wrong perceptions, and most of our perceptions are erroneous."

"Letting go takes a lot of courage sometimes. But once you let go, happiness comes very quickly. You won't have to go around search for it."

"Look deeply at your anger, as you would look at your own child. Don’t reject it or hate it. The point of meditation is not to turn yourself into a battlefield, one side opposing the other. Conscious breathing soothes and calms the anger, and mindfulness penetrates it. Anger is just an energy, and all energies can be transformed. Meditation is the art of using one kind of energy to transform another."

"We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives."

"If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us - to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here."

"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."

"New cells are born everyday and old cells die, but they have neither funerals nor birthdays."

"This love meditation is adapted from the Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa, a 5th century C. E. systematization of the Buddha's teaching. We begin by practicing the love meditation on ourselves ("May I"). Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be much help to others. After that, we practice them on others ("May he/she/they") - first on someone we like, then on someone neutral to us, and finally on someone who makes us suffer. May I be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit. May I be safe and free from injury. May I be free from anger, afflictions, fear and anxiety. May I learn to look at myself with the eyes of of understanding and love. May I be able to recognize and touch the seeds of joy and happiness in myself. May I learn to identify and see the sources of anger, craving, and delusion in myself. May I know how to nourish the seeds of joy in myself every day. May I be able to live fresh, solid, and free. May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not indifferent. Love is not just the intention to love, but the capacity to reduce suffering, and offer peace and happiness. The practice of love increases our forbearance, our capacity to be patient and embrace difficulties and pain. Forbearance does mean that we try to suppress pain."

"The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms."

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future."