Quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh

Doing things with mindfulness means you perform each action with clear awareness of what's happening and of what you're doing in the present moment, and you feel happy as you do it. Mindfulness is the capacity to shine the light of awareness onto what's going on here and now. Mindfulness is the heart of meditation practice.

Mindfulness is the opposite of this tendency. We must invite these things up into our mind consciousness every day and tell them, "My dear, I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of my fear.

Angry in the ultimate dimension I close my eyes and look deeply. Three hundred years from now Where will you be and where shall I be?

We all worked, but we didn't work all day. There was time for us to study the sutras, practice writing, listen to the teachings given by our teacher, chant, and meditate. Most important was meditation. My teacher taught that meditation was the door to understanding, and the career of monks and nuns.

When you produce a thought of hatred, anger, or despair, it harms you, and it also harms the world. None of us wants to be continued like that. We all want to produce thoughts of compassion, understanding, and love.

If you feel that your dreams aren't coming true, you might think that you need to do more, or to think and strategize more. In fact, what you might need is less—less noise coming to you from both inside and outside—so that you have the space for your heart's truest intention to germinate and flourish.

We let individualism prevail in the twentieth century, and frankly, we have made a mess of it. We must begin anew for the twenty-first century; we need a new, different direction. We can no longer continue destroying ourselves and the planet we live on. With determination we can abandon the cult of individualism and the self, and act and live in harmony, in the spirit of interbeing.

To build community, it is important to accept the insight of interbeing, of interconnectedness. We must realize that happiness is not an individual matter. Finding happiness through our separate, individual self is impossible.

True love doesn't contain suffering or attachment. It brings well-being to ourselves and others. True love is generated from within. With true love, you feel complete in yourself; you don't need something from outside. True love is like the sun, shining with its own light, and offering that light to everyone.

If you are happy, all of us will profit from it. Society will profit from it. All living beings will profit from it.

Transforming the past is possible, thanks to meditation practice.

A human being is made up of only non-human elements.