Thich Nhat Hanh

Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love-how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things.

Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying 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.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.