Nhat Hanh People Quotations

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.

One day I saw a picture of the Buddha on a Buddhist magazine and he was sitting on the grass, and he was sitting on the grass, very peaceful, smiling, and I was impressed. Around me people were not like that, so I had the desire to be someone like him. I nourished that kind of desire until the age of sixteen, when I had the permission from my parents to go and ordain as a Buddhist monk.

There are always some people who are ready to embrace a doctrine, a notion, a dogma, and they miss the real teaching.

Science and mindfulness complement each other in helping people to eat well and maintain their health and well-being.

We talk about social service, service to the people, service to humanity, service to others who are far away, helping to bring peace to the world - but often we forget that it is the very people around us that we must live for first of all. If you cannot serve your wife or husband or child or parent - how are you going to serve society? If you cannot make your own child happy, how do you expect to be able to make anyone else happy? If all our friends in the peace movement or of service communities of any kind do not love and help each other, whom can we love and help?

Anyone can practice some nonviolence, even soldiers. Some army generals, for example, conduct their operations in ways that avoid killing innocent people; this is a kind of nonviolence.

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.

If we can not smile, we cannot help other people to smile.

That is why those who are not capable of being there in the present moment, they don't really live their life - they live like dead people.

Buddhism has to do with your daily life, with your suffering and with the suffering of the people around you.

When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, one allows it to spill all over the people around him or her. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere.

When we speak, we want to say something sweet, but we don't say something sweet because something is ordering us from deep down to say something unkind. We want to open our hearts to people, but we can't do it, because we are being ordered around by the sufferings we have concealed deep in our consciousness.

People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result.

Without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.

Maybe we have enough technology to save the planet but it is not enough because the people are not ready.

Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come. I think people in the mass media, journalists, film makers and others, you can contribute to the collective awakening if you are awake and then your life will embody that awakening.

The Buddha also counseled the monks and nuns to avoid wasting any precious time by engaging in idle conversation, oversleeping, pursuing fame and recognition, chasing after desires, spending time with people of poor character, and being satisfied with only a shallow understanding of the teaching.

To educate people for peace, we can use words or we can speak with our lives.

Love doesn't have any color. Other people may discriminate against us, but what is more important is whether we discriminate against them. If we don't do that, we are a happier person, and as a happier person, we are in a position to help. And anger, this is not a help.

But if we have the energy of compassion and loving kindness in us, the people around us will be influenced by our way of being and living.

If we do not know how to take care of ourselves and to love ourselves, we cannot take care of the people we love. Loving oneself is the foundation for loving another person.

People sacrifice the present for the future. But life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now.

A bodhisattva doesn't have to be perfect. Anyone who is aware of what is happening and who tries to wake up other people is a bodhisattva. We are all bodhisattvas, doing our best.

From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax and be peaceful, we may wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth.

To reconcile conflicting parties, we must have the ability to understand the suffering of both sides. If we take sides, it is impossible to do the work of reconciliation. And humans want to take sides. That is why the situation gets worse and worse. Are there people who are still available to both sides? They need not do much. They need do only one thing: Go to one side and tell all about the suffering endured by the other side, and go to the other side and tell all about the suffering endured by this side. This is our chance for peace. But how many of us are able to do that?

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

Many people are alive but don't touch the miracle of being alive.

Some people live as though they are already dead. There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses.

If we are free from attachment, we can easily recognize ourselves in other people, in different forms of manifestation, and then we don't have to suffer.