Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

I have not had time to reflect on my own truths in many years.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

I think about my journey sometimes.

We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.

I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

I wrote the book because I wanted to be able to share some things that I had learned and as pompous as that may sound, as you get to a certain point in life, you figure so what am I doing?

If I'd trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been fine. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I've got it.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.

You try things on in life. You wear them for a while, and you see what's next.

I'm interested in trying to explore what I think is the truth at a given time in my life, and part of the process of being honest is - in my mind - talking about the idea that you're watching a movie. You're sitting here watching a movie. And I like that. It appeals to me intellectually, and also in a way I can't even explain.

If you cannot find the truth within yourself, where else do you expect to find it?

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.

I felt that with 'In A Perfect World' I was still kind of finding myself - not just as a musician, but also in love and in life.

We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.

I was a little truth seeker as a child. I wanted more than anything to understand myself and also other people.

Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I've done thousands of interviews in my life, and it's a format that I quite enjoy, because I think of questions in interviews as an opportunity to sort of gauge my growth in a way. It gives me an idea of how I'm navigating this world that I'm in.