864 Quotes by Thich Nhat Hanh

Often our perceptions are incorrect. We get in touch with an object and think that it embodies love, happiness, a self, or purity. We tend to think that love is something sentimental that will fill the emptiness inside us. We blame our suffering on another person or group, or on bad luck, but outside conditions are not the reason it appears. Our suffering was already there.

If you can’t accept your body and your mind, you can’t be a home for yourself. Many young people don’t accept who they are, and yet they want to be a home for someone else. But how can they be if they’re not yet a home for themselves?

Understanding is a gift. The other person may feel understood for the first time. Understanding is the other name of love. If you don’t understand, you can’t love. If you don’t understand your son, you can’t love him. If you don’t understand your mother, you can’t love her. To offer understanding means to offer love. Without understanding, the more we love, the more we make ourselves and others suffer.

A successful relationship depends on us recognising our own painful feelings and emotions inside—not fighting them, but accepting, embracing, and transforming them to get relief.

Everybody makes mistakes, but you can’t keep asking people to forgive you again and again.True repentance makes you happy and makes the other person happy. Without it, trust will disappear and both of you will be less happy.The other person will know by the way you act that you’re truly beginning anew. Even if the other person doesn’t see it right away, don’t quarrel or be afraid. Just practice well and steadily, and slowly the truth will be revealed and the relationship will improve.

Whenever you find yourself judging your partner, go back to your in-breath and out-breath, and ask, How can I see this differently? Can I look more deeply to better understand her suffering and her difficulties?

Many parents love their children. Yet they make them suffer a lot in the name of love. They’re often not capable of understanding their children’s suffering, difficulties, hopes, and aspirations. We have to ask ourselves, “Am I really loving the other person by understanding them or am I just projecting my own needs?

Even if two people have a baby together, they are still separate. Each of us remains in isolation. It’s not by living together, or by having sexual relations, or even by having children together that we can dispel this feeling of isolation. We can only dispel our mutual isolation when we practice mindfulness and are able to truly come home to ourselves and each other.

The most precious inheritance parents can leave their children is their own happiness. Parents’ happiness is the most valuable gift they can give their children. Your children can use those lessons the whole of their lives. You may not be able to leave them money, houses, and land, but you can help them be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.