Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

You can’t change what you haven’t realized yet. Once you realize what you were asleep to, the change happens on its own.

Awareness is always the first step.

Self awakening enables you to see the human scene as it is, not as it appears to be, which frees you of its chaos.

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.

I have come not to teach but to awaken.

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

He who looks without, dreams; he who looks within, awakes.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue an accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and I have just been born today.

Awareness means that whatsoever is happening in the moment is happening with complete consciousness; you are present there. If you are present when anger is happening, anger cannot happen. It can happen only when you are fast asleep. When you are present, immediate, transformation starts in your being, because when you are present, aware, many things are simply not possible. All that is called sin is not possible if you are aware. So, in fact, there is only one sin and that is unawareness.

Meditation means to awaken new dimensions within you.

It seemed that up until this moment she had been only half alive.

Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem. The point is to see it.

It's just a constant thing when the mind starts to wake up to itself.

Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now - in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

Satori - in the awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one's own being - these are synonymous.

True progress comes not through action, but through awakening.

Those who practice know whether realization is attained or not, just as those who drink water know whether it is hot or cold

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.