Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

It's good to do things slow in the bush. It makes you appreciate everything a lot more.

In my personal opinion, you miss out on the beauty of the moment if you go in planning what the moment is. It's like having a vacation too jam-packed with activities. You miss all of the sunsets.

One of the best things to do sometimes is simply to be.

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.

The Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea provide plenty of opportunities to walk, think and relax.

When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It's to enjoy each step along the way.

I'm not anxious to be anywhere other than where I am right now.

If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.

I just want to enjoy every moment and try to be present in the moment of whatever I'm doing at that time.

When I try to appreciate something, it feels like my hands are around the moment, trying to squeeze it. It's when you really release yourself of the responsibility to be enjoying things that you actually do.

Our walking is not a means to an end. We walk for the sake of walking.

You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea.

I think it is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for walking.

Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea. When you hold your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, and you become fully present. And when you are truly there, something else is also there - life, represented by the cup of tea. In that moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real. You are not lost in the past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries. You are free from all of these afflictions. And in that state of being free, you enjoy your tea. That is the moment of happiness, and of peace.

It is a great art to saunter !

You take yourself out of the moment and knock yourself off balance when you judge and think about what you are doing, rather than experiencing and enjoying what you are doing.

I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

I like walking in the pool. That isn't what makes me feel spiritual. But alive.

Never did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much as in the journeys I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my body must be in motion to move my mind.

And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.