Nhat Hanh
To be beautiful means to be yourself.You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.Collection: Beautiful
The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.Collection: Love
No one is more worthy of your kindness and compassion than you are.Collection: Kindness
Silence is essential. We need silence just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.Collection: Light
You do not suffer because things are impermanent. You suffer because things are impermanent and you think they are permanent.Collection: Uplifting
Around us, life bursts with miracles--a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life's daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.Collection: Laughter
Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.Collection: Happiness
The moment you understand the importance of loving yourself, you will stop hurting others.Collection: Hurt
Choose to be in touch with what is wonderful, refreshing, and healing within yourself and around you.Collection: Healing
Be Yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just Be.Collection: Life
Happiness is available. Please help yourself to it.Collection: Helping
I will practice coming back to the present moment...not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past or letting anxieties, fears, or cravings pull me out.Collection: Regret
You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.Collection: Positive Thinking
We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.Collection: Peaceful
There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.Collection: Order
Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.Collection: Anxiety
You are like a candle. Imagine you are sending light out all around you. All your words, thoughts and actions are going in many directions. If you say something kind, your kind words go in many directions, and you yourself go with them. We are ...transforming and continuing in a different form at every moment.Collection: Yoga
Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other. We see only the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.Collection: Courage
It's like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud you cannot have lotus flowers. Without suffering, you have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate.Collection: Attitude
Take my hand. We will walk. We will only walk. We will enjoy our walk without thinking of arriving anywhere.Collection: Thinking
Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is the only moment.Collection: Buddhist
Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.Collection: Spiritual
True love always brings joy to ourself and the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.Collection: Love
When we have anger in us, we suffer. When we have discrimination in us, we suffer. When we have the complex of superiority, we suffer. When we have the complex of inferiority, we suffer also. So when we are capable of transforming these negative things in us, we are free and happiness is possible.Collection: Suffering
People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality.Collection: Cutting
The Seven Factors of Awakening are mindfulness, investigation of phenomena, diligence, joy, ease, concentration, and letting go.Collection: Letting Go
We all have the seeds of love in us.We can develop this wonderful source of energy, nurturing the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return.Collection: Unconditional Love
There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, «Where are you going?» and the first man replies, «I don't know! Ask the horse!» This is also our story. We are riding a horse, and we don't know where we are going and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless.Collection: Horse
The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and the now. But the question is whether you are available to the kingdom.Collection: Kingdoms
Smile, breathe and go slowly." - Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen monk, author and peace activist.Collection: Breathe
If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.Collection: Yoga
If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.Collection: Buddhist
By eating meat we share responsibility for causing climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian can make a difference in the health of our planet.Collection: Buddhist
The desire to be a free person is very worthwhile. To be free means you are no longer the victim of fear, anger, craving, or suspicion.Collection: Fear
The source of a true smile is an awakened mind. Smiling helps you approach the day with gentleness and understanding.Collection: Understanding
Happiness does not come from consumption of things.Collection: Doe
I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.Collection: Children
You have an appointment with life, an appointment that is in the here and now.Collection: Here And Now
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.Collection: Beautiful
Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart. Even if he says things that are full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion. Because you know that listening like that, you give that person a chance to suffer less.Collection: Heart
Every feeling is a field of energy. A pleasant feeling is an energy which can nourish. Irritation is a feeling which can destroy. Under the light of awareness, the energy of irritation can be transformed into and energy which nourishes.Collection: Irritation
In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask why don't I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden and they abandon their values.Collection: Beautiful
Meditation is not passive sitting in silence. It is sitting in awareness, free from distraction, and realizing the clear understanding that arises from concentration.Collection: Meditation Practice
The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and the now. But the question is whether you are available to the kingdom. Our practice is to make ourselves ready for the kingdom so that it can manifest in the here and the now. You don't need to die in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, you have to be truly alive in order to do so.Collection: Order
What you are looking for is already in you...You already are everything you are seeking.Collection: Seeking
If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.Collection: Peace
Sometimes you have a flash of insight, but it's not strong enough to survive. Therefore in the practice of Buddhism, samadhi is the power to maintain insight alive in every moment, so that every speech, every word, every act will bear the nature of that insight. It is a question of cleaning. And you clean better if you are surrounded by those who are practicing exactly the same.Collection: Strong
When you have a toothache, you think that not having a toothache will make you very happy. But when you don't have a toothache, often you are still not happy. If you practice awareness, you suddenly become very rich, very very happy.Collection: Thinking
Words and thoughts concerning compassionate action that are not put into practice are like beautiful flowers that are colorful but have no fragrance.Collection: Beautiful