Quotes from Thích Nh?t H?nh

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.

The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don't know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

Understanding someone's suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love's other name. If you don't understand, you can't love.

The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.

Without suffering, there's no happiness. So we shouldn't discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.

Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud." —THICH NHAT HANH

A true partner or friend is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you've been seeking.

To take good care of ourselves, we must go back and take care of the wounded child inside of us. You have to practice going back to your wounded child every day. You have to embrace him or her terderly, like a big brother or a big sister. You have to talk to him, talk to her. And you can write a letter to the Little child in you, of two or three pages, to that you recognize his or her presence, and will do everything you can to heal his or her wounds.

Every person is a world to explore.

Don't do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention. Enjoy and be one with your work.

You do not need to waste your time doing those things that are unnecessary and trifling. You do not have to be rich. You do not need to seek fame or power. What you need is freedom, solidity, peace and joy. You need the time and energy to be able to share these things with others.

Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we're feeding our suffering while we're walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We're not living our lives.

Other people's actions are the result of their own pain and not the result of any intention to hurt you.

LOVING KINDNESS The first element of true love is loving kindness. The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can't offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person.

the art of happiness is also the art of suffering well.

When you hold a child in your arms, or hug your mother, or your husband, or your friend, if you breathe in and out three times, your happiness will be multiplied at least tenfold.

Your purpose is to be yourself. You don't have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just as you are.

Some people do not even want to look at a person when the person is alive, but when the person dies they write eloquent obituaries and make offerings of flowers. At that point the person has died and cannot really enjoy the fragrance of the flowers anymore. If we really understood and remembered that life was impermanent, we would do everything we could to make the other person happy right here and right now.

The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.

When a person's speech is full of anger, it is because he or she suffers deeply.

There is nowhere to arrive except the present moment.

Touching the present moment, we realize that the present is made of the past and is creating the future.

There is a Zen story about a man riding a horse that is galloping very quickly. Another man, standing alongside the road, yells at him, Where are you going? and the man on the horse yells back, I don't know. Ask the horse. I think that is our situation. We are riding many horses that we cannot control.

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.