Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

When you are suffering, you become more understanding about yourself, but also about other people's sufferings too. That's the first step to understand somebody is to understand their sufferings. So then love follows.

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.

Compassion is more important than intellect in calling forth the love that the work of peace needs, and intuition can often be a far more powerful searchlight than cold reason.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

If you can understand, you can feel compassion.

Tolerance is a cheap, low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.

To love is human, it is also human to forgive.

Compassion is the ability to see how it all is.

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

It is by love alone that we understand anything

The only answer to fear is more understanding. And there is no understanding if there is no effort to look more deeply to see what is there in our heart and in the heart of the other person.

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

Everyone deserves compassion.

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

I just don't know that shame and fear need to be our teachers; rather, compassion, understanding, and love should be our guides.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

I believe that if you can discover something of the truth of a person, then you will start to understand, and to understand is to move towards, if not like, then at least an empathy of some kind.

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

If you have the support of people with a heart and a brain, then you're good.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.