Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.

There is no separation between mind and body... Self and other co-arise and fall away all the time.

The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.

The whole world changes when there's presence - sunlight everywhere - because you're not separate from the world.

In one sheet of paper, we see everything else, the cloud, the forest, the logger. I am, therefore you are. You are, therefore I am. That is the meaning of the word "interbeing." We interare.

All phenomena are empty.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

The idea of interdependence is central to Buddhism, which holds that all things come into being through the mutual interactions of various causes and conditions.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

There is nothing you can see that is not a Bashoflower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

I try not to think of my life in terms of separation.

I think one has to understand, not as a theory, not as a speculative, entertaining concept, but rather as an actual fact - that we are the world and the world is us. The world is each one of us; to feel that, to be really committed to it and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary, but whole.

You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. [...] Nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all of life.

If the ocean was pure mind and I was a wave, I would be in terror if Itried to distinguish myself fromthe water that produced me.What is a wave without water, and what is a mind without God?

Raindrops are beating, a large puddle is forming, there on the balcony. It all floats in Emptiness, in purest Transparency, with no one here to watch it. If there is an I, it is all that is arising, right now and right now and right now. My lungs are the sky; those mountains are my teeth; the clouds are my skin; the thunder is my heart beating time to the timeless; the rain itself, the tears of our collective estate, here where nothing is really happening.

All the big problems of the world today are routed in the philosophy of separateness and dualism.

You think of yourself as an "individual person", with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is an illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between- these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled.

You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.

Differentiation is how ONE becomes many while remaining ONE. Differentiation is not separation.

Drop your identification with the illusion of separateness.

The point is that if you accept that there is only one energy in all things, then on an energy level there is no giving or receiving - just energy moving around within itself. It's only the ego that sees a separateness in things. So the ego will say, "The Cadillac went from Harry to Sally." But on an infinite level, it is neither Harry's nor Sally's, it is a part of all things. It is. Where it finds itself and whose name is on the owner's manual is irrelevant.

For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation.

You cannot separate any part from the whole: interdependence rules the cosmic order.