Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

People think meditation is a huge undertaking.

I meditate. I've been a meditator since, I think I was doing it unofficially before all my life and then began to formalize it somewhere around 14.

I don't have to go to a mountain to meditate. I'm meditative in every moment of my life.

Spiritual practice is not just sitting and meditation. Practice is looking, thinking, touching, drinking, eating and talking. Every act, every breath, and every step can be practice and can help us to become more ourselves.

Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating.

Meditation stops the sound-loving mind.

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

One of the things I love about yoga is that it brings you into the present moment. You aren't worried about what will happen tomorrow and you aren't thinking about what happened yesterday. It's about opening your heart and living from your heart.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

One way to recollect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and preserve it more in tranquillity, is not to let it wander too far at other times. You should keep it strictly in the presence of God; and being accustomed to think of Him often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in the time of prayer, or at least to recall it from its wanderings.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

I think [Transcendental Meditation] is what people need. They don't need high minded talk, they need results.

Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be powerfully transformative. And it's free.

The greatest help to spiritual life is meditation.

Remember always that the ultimate value is meditation, so anything you do, do meditatively; and all things can be done in a meditative way.

Because of Christianity the West has missed many things, and one of them is meditation, the rarest flowering of a human being, because they have made it equivalent to contemplation. Contemplation is thinking. Meditation is no-thinking.

I do not put much emphasis on periods of meditation - if you do meditation, it's fine - but the important thing is to bring the awareness into everyday life, into every little action that you do, into the varied challenges of everyday life.

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God.

I think it's so important to have a practice, because the consciousness isn't perfection or enlightenment or any of that bullshit. The consciousness is, "Oh, I'm walking down the street and I'm doing nothing."

The practice of Zen is to eat, breathe, cook, carry water, and scrub the toilet — to infuse every act of body, speech, and mind — with mindfulness, to illuminate every leaf and pebble, every heap of garbage, every path that leads to our mind's return home.

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

Instead of 'watching the thinker,' you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

I pray. Prayer is a time to connect with the divine, but also time, I'm sure, to concentrate one's thoughts, to meditate, and to imagine what might be.

We switch to another language-- not our invented language or the language we've learned from our lives. As we walk further up the mountain, we speak the language of silence. This language gives us time to think and move. We can be here and elsewhere at the same time.

Meditation has to become your heartbeat; even when you are asleep the meditation continues like an undercurrent