Thích Nhất Hạnh (/ˈtɪk ˈnjʌt ˈhʌn/; Vietnamese: [tʰǐk ɲɜ̌t hɐ̂ʔɲ] ( listen); born as Nguyễn Xuân Bảo on October 11, 1926) is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist.
Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift!
The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment.
We have to learn to die in every moment in order to be fully alive.
To abandon the present in order to look for things in the future is to throw away the substance and hold onto the shadow.
Let us fill our hearts with our own compassion - towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Without understanding, your love is not true love. You must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the one you love.
We are often sad and suffer a lot when things change, but change and impermanence have a positive side. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. . . If your daughter is not impermanent, she cannot grow up to become a woman. Then your grandchildren would never manifest.
Knowing that anger makes me ugly, I smile instead. I return to myself and meditate on love.
Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice. . . No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.
We ourselves need love; it's not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can't expect that love to come from outside of us. We should ask the question whether we are capable of loving ourselves as well as others.
We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.
Meditation is not passive sitting in silence. It is sitting in awareness, free from distraction, and realizing the clear understanding that arises from concentration.
It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available-more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don't have to run into the future in order to get more.
When you are a young person, you are like a young creek, and you meet many rocks, many obstacles and difficulties on your way. You hurry to get past these obstacles and get to the ocean. But as the creek moves down through the fields, it becomes larges and calmer and it can enjoy the reflection of the sky. It's wonderful. You will arrive at the sea anyway so enjoy the journey. Enjoy the sunshine, the sunset, the moon, the birds, the trees, and the many beauties along the way. Taste every moment of your daily life.
Wisdom and joy arise when you learn to exist now rather than in the nonexistent past or future.
Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.
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.
Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come. I think people in the mass media, journalists, film makers and others, you can contribute to the collective awakening if you are awake and then your life will embody that awakening.
With understanding, those we love will certainly flower.
Even if we cannot be completely non-voilent, by being vegetarian we are going in the direction of non-voilence