Thich Nhat Hanh

Today, you can decide to walk in freedom. You can choose to walk differently. You can walk as a free person, enjoying every step.

If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!

Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.

Our own life has to be our message.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

This is the comfort of the godly: the grave cannot hold them, and they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.

Leave the rest to the gods.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon