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.

The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

Our own life has to be our message.

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

The hottest love has the coldest end.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.