Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.

The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness.

All phenomena are empty.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way - everything is interdependent, not absolute.

You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. [...] Nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all of life.

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper? ?To be? is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

There is no separation between mind and body... Self and other co-arise and fall away all the time.

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.

We are in the cosmos and the cosmos is in us.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected.

It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

you can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.

We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe.

Without being in constant exchange with the rest of the cosmos, you cannot exist. The idea of individuality is an illusion.

You think of yourself as an "individual person", with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is an illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between- these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled.

The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.

The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.

It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.

You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.