Nhat Hanh
Whenever anger comes up, take out a mirror and look at yourself. When you are angry, you are not very beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Recognize that it is not really possible to steadily help others when we ourselves are not in good physical, mental, or emotional state. We may be able to carry on for a while, but sooner or later we end up feeling depleted, discouraged, or weak. We cannot keep on giving when we are running on an empty tank. We need to be solid.Collection: Motivational
As a human being, you have the right to get angry; but as a practitioner, you do not have the right to stop practicing.Collection: Practice
The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.Collection: Strong
Each second of life is a miracleCollection: Miracle
Smile, breathe, go slowly.Collection: Inspirational
Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept which can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence.Collection: Reality
Just breathing and smiling can make us very happy, because when we breathe consciously we recover ourselves completely and encounter life in the present moment.Collection: Smile
The fact is that when you make the other suffer, he will try to find relief by making you suffer more. The result is an escalation of suffering on both sides.Collection: Suffering
If we can not smile, we cannot help other people to smile.Collection: Helping Others
The way we live our daily lives is what most effects the situation of the world. If we can change our daily lives, then we can change our governments and can change the world. Our president and governments are us. They reflect our lifestyle and our way of thinking. The way we hold a cup of tea, pick up the newspaper or even use toilet paper are directly related to peace.Collection: Peace
Breathe in and take one step, and focus all your attention on the sole of your foot. If you have not arrived fully, one hundred percent in the here and the now, don't take the next step.Collection: Feet
But if we have the energy of compassion and loving kindness in us, the people around us will be influenced by our way of being and living.Collection: Kindness
Forgiveness will not be possible until compassion is born in your heart.Collection: Forgiveness
No single tradition monopolizes the truth. We must glean the best values of all traditions and work together to remove the tensions between traditions in order to give peace a chance.Collection: Order
Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. When you peel it and smell it, it’s wonderful. You can take your time eating a tangerine and be very happy.Collection: Happiness
Live in such a way that you embody true peace, that you can be peace in every moment of your daily life. It is possible for everyone to generate the energy of peace in every step.Collection: Energy
Happiness is not an individual matter.Collection: Matter
The Buddha said that if we know how to look deeply into our suffering and recognize what feeds it, we are already on the path of emancipation.Collection: Suffering
Just listen Be peace.Collection: Just Listen
We must look deeply into the nature of our volition to see whether it is pushing us in the direction of liberation from suffering and toward peace and compassion, or in the direction of affliction and misery. What is it that we really want deep in our heart? Is it money, fame, power? Or is it finding inner peace, being able to live life fully and enjoy the present moment?Collection: Motivational
To educate people for peace, we can use words or we can speak with our lives.Collection: Peace
Human beings are innately loving beings. When we fail to love, it is because an element of ignorance has intruded into our experience, submerging our natural impulse to love.Collection: Love
With understanding, those we love will certainly flower.Collection: Flower
Sometimes we believe that happiness is not possible in the here and now, that we need a few more conditions to be happy. So we run toward the future to get the conditions we think are missing. But by doing so we sacrifice the present moment; we sacrifice true life.Collection: Motivational
Loneliness cannot be alleviated just by the coming together of two bodies, unless there is also good communication, understanding, and loving kindness.Collection: Kindness
By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better & prepare for a better future.Collection: Past
May we awaken from the dream that we are different.Collection: Dream
Contemplate to see that awakened people, while not being enslaved by the work of serving living beings, never abandon their work of serving living beings.Collection: People
Freedom is the real foundation of happiness.Collection: Happiness
You are like fireworks. You go out into your children, your friends, your society, and the whole world.Collection: Children
When we speak, we want to say something sweet, but we don't say something sweet because something is ordering us from deep down to say something unkind. We want to open our hearts to people, but we can't do it, because we are being ordered around by the sufferings we have concealed deep in our consciousness.Collection: Sweet
In April, we cannot see sunflowers in France, so we might say the sunflowers do not exist. But the local farmers have already planted thousands of seeds, and when they look at the bare hills, they may be able to see the sunflowers already. The sunflowers are there. They lack only the conditions of sun, heat, rain and July. Just because we cannot see them does not mean that they do not exist.Collection: Peace
At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point.Collection: Stress
In all the practice centers in the tradition of Plum Village whenever the phone rings or the clock chimes in the dining hall, people stop everything they are doing and breathe consciously, releasing all thinking and any tension.Collection: Motivational
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.Collection: Rain
The problem that faces us is the problem of awakening. What we lack is not an ideology or doctrine that will save the world. What we lack is mindfulness of what we are, of what our situation really is. We need to wake up in order to rediscover our human sovereignty. We are riding a horse that is running out of control. The way of salvation is a new culture in which human beings are encouraged to rediscover their deepest nature.Collection: Running
Each minute we spend worrying about the future and regretting the past is a minute we miss in our appointment with life - a missed opportunity to engage life and to see that each moment gives us the chance to change for the better, to experience peace and joy.Collection: Motivational
Compassion is a verb.Collection: Sympathy
Meditation is not an escape from life... but preparation for really being in life.Collection: Meditation
Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible fo everything that happens around us.Collection: Looks
When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, one allows it to spill all over the people around him or her. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere.Collection: People
Go slowly, breathe and smile.Collection: Smile
When you produce peace and happiness in yourself, you begin to realize peace for the whole world. With the smile that you produce in yourself, with the conscious breathing you establish within yourself, you begin to work for peace in the world.Collection: Happiness
Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this. Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing. We don't need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky. We don't have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing. We can be in touch with these things right now.Collection: Sunshine
Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder. If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth.Collection: Mean
Often, we feel that we need a leader outside of ourselves -a Buddha, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.- to show the way. But we have the Buddha inside of us. We have Gandhi and King inside of us as well. We are interconnected. We don't need to wait for some other person to be the change we want to see in the worldCollection: Kings
To meditate with mindful breathing is to bring body and mind back to the present moment so that you do not miss your appointment with life.Collection: Life
To be spiritual means to be solid, calm, and peaceful and to be able to look deeply inside and around us.Collection: Spiritual