Top 450 Nhat Hanh Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “To reconcile conflicting parties, we must have the ability to understand the suffering of both sides.”

— Nhat Hanh

252. “It is my conviction that there is no way to peace – peace is the way.”

— Nhat Hanh

253. “When your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion.”

— Nhat Hanh

254. “Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realise your ideal of compassion.”

— Nhat Hanh

255. “Birth is okay and death is okay, if we know that they are only concepts in our mind. Reality transcends both birth and death.”

— Nhat Hanh

256. “You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea.”

— Nhat Hanh

257. “We need to move beyond the idea of ‘environment’ and fall back in love with Mother Earth.”

— Nhat Hanh

258. “You can practice deep listening in order to relieve the suffering in us, and in the other person. That kind of listening is described as compassionate listening. You listen only for the purpose of relieving suffering in the other person.”

— Nhat Hanh

259. “The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. Nonviolence is not a dogma; it is a process.”

— Nhat Hanh

260. “Without full awareness of breathing, there can be no development of meditative stability and understanding.”

— Nhat Hanh

261. “When you have a stomach ache you don’t tell your stomach to go away.”

— Nhat Hanh

262. “Peace in ourselves, peace in the world.”

— Nhat Hanh

263. “May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.”

— Nhat Hanh

264. “Meditation is offering your genuine presence to yourself in every moment.”

— Nhat Hanh

265. “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.”

— Nhat Hanh

266. “The raft is used to cross the river. It isn’t to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn’t the moon itself.”

— Nhat Hanh

267. “Eating mindfully is a most important practice of meditation. We can eat in a way that we restore the cookie of our childhood. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.”

— Nhat Hanh

268. “When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.”

— Nhat Hanh

269. “Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity.”

— Nhat Hanh

270. “Due to attachment, anger, and foolishness, I have committed numberless mistakes in speech, deed and thought. I bow my head and repent. I vow from today to begin anew, to live day and night in mindfulness, and not to repeat my previous mistakes.”

— Nhat Hanh

271. “The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest. But many of us, even when we go on vacation, don’t know how to rest. We may even come back more tired than before we left.”

— Nhat Hanh

272. “Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred.”

— Nhat Hanh

273. “Happiness is the cessation of suffering.”

— Nhat Hanh

274. “Freedom is the real foundation of happiness.”

— Nhat Hanh

275. “We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.”

— Nhat Hanh

276. “Tolerance and tranquility are two characteristics of true love.”

— Nhat Hanh

277. “It’s wonderful to be alive and to walk on earth.”

— Nhat Hanh

278. “If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that when the truth comes and knocks on our door, we won’t want to let it in.”

— Nhat Hanh

279. “By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.”

— Nhat Hanh

280. “The more compassionate you are, the more generous you can be. The more generous you are, the move loving friendliness you cultivate to help the world.”

— Nhat Hanh

281. “When we change our daily lives – the way we think, speak and act – we change the world.”

— Nhat Hanh

282. “Happiness is not an individual matter.”

— Nhat Hanh

283. “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.”

— Nhat Hanh

284. “We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.”

— Nhat Hanh

285. “Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.”

— Nhat Hanh

286. “The secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself.”

— Nhat Hanh

287. “If we are not peaceful, if we are not feeling well in our skin, we cannot demonstrate real peace, and we cannot raise our children well either.”

— Nhat Hanh

288. “Our life is a manifestation, and we can very well make that manifestation beautiful and meaningful and have a good influence.”

— Nhat Hanh

289. “Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.”

— Nhat Hanh

290. “When we enter the present moment deeply, our regrets and sorrows disappear, and we discover life with all its wonders.”

— Nhat Hanh

291. “As long as you find something beautiful, good, and true to believe in and abide by, you have the equivalent of God in your life.”

— Nhat Hanh

292. “To meditate is to be aware of what is going on – in our bodies, our feelings our minds, and in the world. When we settle into the present moment, we can see the beauties and wonders before our eyes.”

— Nhat Hanh

293. “The first thing I learned was that even if you have a lot of money and power and fame, you can still suffer very deeply.”

— Nhat Hanh

294. “Fear is born from ignorance. We think that the other person is trying to take away something from us. But if we look deeply, we see that the desire of the other person is exactly our own desire – to have peace, to be able to have a chance to live.”

— Nhat Hanh

295. “Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”

— Nhat Hanh

296. “In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.”

— Nhat Hanh

297. “For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”

— Nhat Hanh

298. “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.”

— Nhat Hanh

299. “The only answer to fear is more understanding. And there is no understanding if there is no effort to look more deeply to see what is there in our heart and in the heart of the other person.”

— Nhat Hanh

300. “An emotion is only an emotion. It’s just a small part of your whole being. You are much more than your emotion. An emotion comes, stays for a while, and goes away, just like a storm. If you’re aware of that, you won’t be afraid of your emotions.”

— Nhat Hanh