Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next, and the texture and flavor of the dessert, together with the pleasure of eating it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able to live in the present moment.

If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything

Live now. When you are eating, eat. When you are loving, love. when you are talking with someone, talk. When you are looking at a flower, look. Catch the beauty of the moment!

Wherever we are we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other and the wonder of our breathing.

Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this. Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing. We don't need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky. We don't have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing. We can be in touch with these things right now.

As I learned from chapters past, it's important to try and stay in the chapter that you're in, and enjoy it while it's lasting. Not be constantly worrying about where this step will take you - living in the potential future. Like a good meal. Like a good chef's tasting meal. You don't want to wonder what's next while you're eating the foie gras.

So being present becomes more and more the exercise the older you get.

I travel so much and am always living out of a suitcase, so my favorite saying is 'Wherever you go, there you are'. I love it because it's reassuring to me that you have to live in the moment wherever you happen to be.

The willingness and ability to live fully in the now eludes many people. While eating your appetizer, don't be concerned with dessert.

The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

I just like being present.

It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.

I've just learned to enjoy every moment for what it is and take it all in.

I always try to live in the moment.

I just try to enjoy each day.

The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

Be present in all things and thankful for all things.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Dogs help you to appreciate the world around you. They smell the ground so intensely. They look at the trees as though they are seeing them for the first time. It helps us to remember the wonders that we take for granted.

If only, then, I had been more living out of the present--such a beautiful word...present. The sense of it being, now to me, more beautiful than 'to look forward.

It isn't the great big pleasures that count the most; it's making a great deal out of the little ones--I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be for ever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant.

There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

The way to develop the habit of savoring is to pause when something is beautiful and good and catches our attention - the sound of rain, the look of the night sky - the glow in a child's eyes, or when we witness some kindness. Pause... then totally immerse in the experience of savoring it.

Bring awareness to each act. Walking on the road, walk fully alert; eating, eat with awareness. Whatsoever you are doing, don't let the past and the future interfere. Be in the present. That's what awareness is all about.