Great Throughts Treasury

"Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world. If we get in touch with the suffering of the world, and are moved by that suffering, we may come forward to help the people who are suffering." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Every path, every street in the world is your walking meditation path." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"I am breathing in and liberating my mind. I am breathing out and liberating my mind. One practices like this." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"I promise myself that I will enjoy every minute of the day that is given me to live." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"In the West you have been struggling for many years with the problem of evil. But in the light of non-duality, there is not any problem. You need both right and left to have a branch. Do not take sides, if you take sides, you are trying to eliminate half of reality, which is impossible. For many years, the United States has been trying to describe the Soviet Union as the evil side. Some Americans even have the illusion they can survive alone, without the other half. If we look at America very deeply, we see the Soviet Union. And if we look deeply at the Soviet union, we see America. If we look deeply at the rose, we see the garbage; if we look deeply at the garbage, we see the rose. In this international situation, each side is pretending to be the rose, and calling the other side garbage. Survival means the survival of human kind as a whole, not just a part of it. If the South cannot survive, then the North is going to crumble. If countries of Third World cannot pay their debts, you are going to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care of the Third World, your well-being is not going to last, and you will not be able to continue living in the way you have been much longer. It is leaping out at us already. You cannot leave the job to the governments or the political scientists alone. You have to do it yourself." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Live in such a way that you embody true peace, that you can be peace in every moment of your daily life. It is possible for everyone to generate the energy of peace in every step." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Love is a beautiful flower, but if you don’t know how to handle the flower, it will be garbage in one year or less… But we can look into the nature of the flower." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The leaf and his body were one. Neither possessed a separate permanent self. Neither could exist independently from the rest of the universe." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation is in the way we handle this very moment." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"This is what the Buddha taught. When conditions are sufficient things manifest. When conditions are no longer sufficient things withdraw. They wait until the moment is right for them to manifest again." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. A pessimistic attitude can never create the calm and serene smile which blossoms on the lips of Bodhisattvas and all those who obtain the way." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Understanding means throwing away your knowledge." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"We should be treated with great respect, great affection and compassion. It is very important to treat our bodies with the utmost respect, with understanding, with compassion. If you know how to treat your body and your feelings with such respect, you will also be able to treat another person with the same respect and that is how we build peace." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Working for peace in the future is to work for peace in the present moment." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"You can use your life in a very useful and intelligent way. You can very well transform that negative energy into a positive energy that empowers you and makes life meaningful." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Your breathing should flow gracefully, like a river, like a watersnake crossing the water, and not like a chain of rugged mountains or the gallop of a horse. To master our breath is to be in control of our bodies and minds. Each time we find ourselves dispersed and find it difficult to gain control of ourselves by different means, the method of watching the breath should always be used." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Your smile affirms your awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. How many days slip by in forgetfulness? What are you doing with your life? Look deeply, and smile. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness." - Thomas Hardy

"If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase." - Thomas Jefferson

"In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy. We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it. Hence, our first constitutions had really no leading principles in them. But experience and reflection have but more and more confirmed me in the particular importance of the equal representation then proposed." - Thomas Jefferson

"It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely, and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion." - Thomas Jefferson

"It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour." - Thomas Jefferson

"Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it is what I have steadfastly believed." - Thomas Jefferson

"Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it as earned." - Thomas Jefferson

"The law of self-preservation is higher than written law." - Thomas Jefferson

"The precept is wise which directs us to try all things, and hold fast that which is good." - Thomas Jefferson

"The principles on which we engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights." - Thomas Jefferson

"We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations, as with individuals, our interests soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact, that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others." - Thomas Jefferson

"For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture." - Thomas Merton

"Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results." - Thomas Merton

"Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation." - Thomas Merton

"The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter." - Thomas Merton

"We are living at a time when it is absolutely es­sential to make a clean cut distinction between the magical attitude and the religious attitude in life. We have today as men never dreamed of having in other days, coercive control over tremendous forces in the natural world. We make daily trial of these forces, we “tempt” them, and they obey. We press the button, and throw the switch, and spin the dial, and step on the accelerator and the gods of all mythology touch their caps in deferential obedience to our slightest whim. The applied sciences of the twentieth century do make magicians of us all. It should be said at once that the pure scientist stands absolutely free of the charge of practicing magic. The affinities of pure science are with re­ligion, in that its reference is not from the universe to man’s uses, but from man to the realities of his universe. But the pure scientist is as rare a creature in our world as the pure saint. The vulgar modern heresy that society is made up of a large number of very pure scientists and an equally large number of very impure Christians is simply grotesque. Once in a while this world sees men like Saint Francis, John Woolman, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday; once in a great while. But the pure scientist is as much an exception in a university laboratory as the pure saint is an exception in a sectarian meeting house. For the most part we have at hand a society of persons practicing variously in the names of re­ligion and science a self-willed, uncritical, and arro­gant attempt to make the ultimate forces give them what they severally desire. And this temptation of the Lord their God is neither science nor religion in the noblest meaning of those words." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

"The texture of experience is prior to everything else." - Willem de Kooning

"Works of Art can only be produc'd in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it." - William Blake

"Confucius perspired out more knowledge than the U. S. Senate has vocalized out in the last 50 years." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The good old days with most of us was when we didn’t earn enough to pay an income tax." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"My dear, he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"An eye deceives its possessor. - Kenya Proverb" -

"To be a friend a man should remember that we are human magnets: that like attracts like, and that what we give we get." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians." - Wilhelm Reich