Thich Nhat Hanh

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

Today, you can decide to walk in freedom. You can choose to walk differently. You can walk as a free person, enjoying every step.

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.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

I do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. They prefer suffering that is familiar to the unknown.

Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.