Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.

Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown

As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.

The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.

In the Middle West now you got to put a brand on your soil, then in the Spring go on a round-up looking for it.

People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the Am-notness that I come, and to it I always return.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pool singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The universe is real, but you can't see it. You have to imagine it.

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe much unseen is also here

Truth is a necessary phantom.

Soil erosion is as old as agriculture. It began when the first heavy rain struck the first furrow turned by a crude implement of tillage in the hands or prehistoric man. It has been going on ever since, wherever man's culture of the earth has bared the soil to rain and wind.

This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

When we're young, everything is possible; when we're old, possibilities are everything.

If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

What is the use of a new-born child ?

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give out attention to it

Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing.

To perceive victory when it is known to all is not really skilful... It does not take much strength to lift a hair, it does not take sharp eyes to see the sun and moon, it does not take sharp ears to hear the thunderclap.