Quotes from Nhat Hanh

We need to move beyond the idea of 'environment' and fall back in love with Mother Earth.

In every one of us there are good seeds and bad. We have the seed of brotherhood, love, compassion, insight. But we have also the seed of anger, hate, dissent.

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.

The war is in our souls.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies... if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives -- the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.

Wisdom and joy arise when you learn to exist now rather than in the nonexistent past or future.

Let us not be afraid of decreasing. It is like the moon, we see the moon increasing and decreasing, but it is always the moon.

You cannot transmit wisdom and insight to another person. The seed is already there. A good teacher touches the seed, allowing it to wake up, to sprout, and to grow.

In the mountains of wisdom no climbing is in vain.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

When we give ourselves the chance to let go of all our tension, the body's natural capacity to heal itself can begin to work.

Anxiety is the illness of our age. We worry about ourselves, our family, our friends, our work, and our state of the world. If we allow worry to fill our hearts, sooner or later we will get sick.

Anger is like a flame blazing up and consuming our self-control, making us think, say, and do things that we will probably regret later.

There are some people who eat an orange but don't really eat it. They eat their sorrow, fear, anger, past, and future.

Anger and hatred are the materials from which hell is made.

If you get angry easily, it may be because the seed of anger in you has been watered frequently over many years, and unfortunately you have allowed it or even encouraged it to be watered.

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.

Working for peace in the future is to work for peace in the present moment.

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.

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.

There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is.

If the people who hurt us have anger or desperation within them then they suffer. When you see that someone suffers, you might be motivated by a desire to help him not to suffer anymore.

When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.