Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

Listen to the silence. Listen to your life. Be present, not just think about what's going on next week, next month.

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

I am only at home in the present.

I've known for years that you're supposed to be present. I know that thinking about what's happened or thinking about what I want is not going to get me anywhere, but until I quit doing it I'm not present.

I want to stay true to who I am by trying to be in the moment.

The secret is not to act, but to be.

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.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Don't wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

I don't want to look back and be like, 'You had it all, and you weren't even present for it. You weren't able to enjoy it.' I want to be here, be now and be grateful.

I stopped thinking; I just go out, and everything is in the moment. I just stop thinking and start moving - you just gotta be you.

I live in the present.

You have to live in the present, I think.

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.

You can't wait for the end of your problems for you to be present. It has to be done whereever you are - which is now

Don't be absent from your own life.

I have learned how to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present, because that is where I am destined to live.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

Live in the present, forget the past. Give up hopes of future.

If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there - thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems - then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvellous reality. Then you can see him smile and you can embrace him in your arms.

Here it is - right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.

We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.

Don't let your life just go in one eye and out the other.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

If you have your full attention in the moment, you will see only love.