Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.

What we put into every moment is all we have. You can drug yourself to death or you can smoke yourself to death or eat yourself to death, or you can do everything right and be healthy and then get hit by a car. Life is so great, such a neat thing, and yet all during it we have to face death, which can make you nuts and depressed.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer.

It's not that "today is the first day of the rest of my life," but that now is all there is of my life.

What I like about that is it kind of puts you in your place. Don't count on being remembered. Just live now, you know?

Die each moment so that you are renewed each moment.

You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.

You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life's about change.

I know my life is nearing its end and I accept that.

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Death is a companion for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're aware of it or not, and it's not necessarily a terrible thing.

Zen teaches that once we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it.

Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.

I live for now, not for what happens after I die.

Life is the game that must be played, this truth at least, good friends, we know; so live and laugh, nor be dismayed as one by one the phantoms go.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

The thought of my mortality - I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number's up.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.

I've become more comfortable as time has gone on with saying goodbye because... I've been having so many conversations about the cyclical nature of life. It just keeps going.