Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

For all the happiness mankind can gain Is not in pleasure, but in rest from pain.

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

Happiness is the absence of suffering. I think it's an interesting way of looking at it. I think the absence of suffering exists very rarely in the world we live in.

I guess I don't think there's any reason to feel guilty about having joy in your life, regardless of how bad things are in the world.

Happiness is an inside job.

Happiness is state of mind.

It's so much easier to be happy. It's so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you're missing, or what it is that you're imagining you're missing. It is so much more peaceful.

Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.

As long as we think our lives are not good enough (materially), we will not have happiness. As soon as we realize our lives are good enough, happiness immediately appears. That is the practice of contentment.

Of mortals there is no one who is happy. If wealth flows in upon one, one may be perhaps luckier than one's neighbor, but still not happy.

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.

It is an important thing, in our never-ending pursuit of happiness, to stop and just be happy for a while.

Happiness is the art of learning how to get joy from your substance.

[I] never talk about gratitude and joy separately, for this reason. In 12 years, I've never interviewed a single person who would describe their lives as joyful, who would describe themselves as joyous, who was not actively practicing gratitude.

Happiness isn’t some elusive treasure we chase after. It’s a state of being we need to PRACTICE.

The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.

Grandpa says we've got everything to make us happy but happiness.

That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

I have lived large parts of my life in wonderful circumstances that I utterly failed to appreciate. Reasons to be happy were everywhere, but somehow I didn't connect with them. It was as though I was eating but couldn't taste the food. Finally, I've learned to celebrate the good while it's happening. I feel gratitude and praise today for what are sometimes such simple pleasures. I have learned that happiness is not determined by circumstances. Happiness is not what happens when everything goes the way you think it should go; happiness is what happens when you decide to be happy.

Happiness depends on what happens; joy does not.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

Happiness is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of happiness.

If there are people at once rich and content, be assured that they are content because they know how to be so, not because they are rich

I believe joy is a spiritual practice we have to work at.

Our joy does not have to be based on our circumstances.