Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.

That non-attachment gives us the freedom to be exactly who we are.

Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.

Love without attachment is light.

We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by - those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Ultimately spiritual awareness unfolds when you're flexible, when you're spontaneous, when you're detached, when you're easy on yourself and easy on others.

Not being anxious requires a level of humility, doesn't it? It does, I think. It's not all about you.

And the Buddha is the person who's free: free of plans, free of cares.

Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?

We must be able to appreciate and enjoy the places where we tarry and yet pass on without anguish when we are called elsewhere. In our spiritual development we are often required to pull up roots many times and to close many chapters in our lives until we are no longer attached to any material thing and can love all people without any attachment to them.

If you try too much to change the outside, that shows that you are still attached. If a man tries to be detached, it shows attachment. Why bother about detachment if you are not attached? If a man escapes from women, it shows that sex is still the obsession. Otherwise, why escape from women if you are not obsessed?

Letting go is freedom. When you find yourself in a useless battle, you merely walk off the battlefield.

How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.

Become detached from your ego, become detached from your possessions. Become simply detached from every possible source of attachment.

No one can be a yogi, maintaining a state of mental equilibrium, free from inner involvement in planned desireful activities, unless he has renounced identification with his ego and its unsatisfiable lust for the fruits of actions.

I try really hard not to be attached to success.

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment.

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

Real change isn't found in some new way to think about yourself, but in freedom from the need to think about yourself at all.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

Man must do his part and detach himself from created things.

I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.