No Mud, No Lotus Quotes

“Mindfulness is the best way to be with our suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Mindfulness is the capacity to dwell in the present moment, to know what’s happening in the here and now. For example, when we’re lifting our two arms, we’re conscious of the fact that we’re lifting our arms. Our mind is with our lifting of our arms, and we don’t think about the past or the future, because lifting our arms is what’s happening in the present moment.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“We don’t have to wait for the end of all suffering before we can be happy. Happiness is available to us right here and right now. But we may need to change our idea of happiness. Our idea of happiness may itself be the main obstacle keeping us from true happiness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“A human being without understanding is a human being without compassion, utterly alone, cut off, and isolated. To connect with others, however, we first have to be willing to look deeply into ourselves.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“The most precious thing you can offer the person you love is your presence.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“We each have many kinds of “seeds” lying deep in our consciousness. Those we water are the ones that sprout, come up into our awareness, and manifest outwardly. So in our own consciousness there is hell, and there is also paradise.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense. The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Play the role of a bell of mindfulness. Your squeezing the hand is like a bell, lovingly calling your friend back to himself. That squeeze means, "I am here for you, you don't need to do anything but breathe.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“So the practice is not to fight or suppress the feeling, but rather to cradle it with a lot of tenderness. When a mother embraces her child, that energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the child. Even if the mother doesn’t understand at first why the child is suffering and she needs some time to find out what the difficulty is, just her act of taking the child into her arms with tenderness can already bring relief. If we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“you suffer from depression, your depression won’t be able to go away until you know how to stop. You’ve lived in such a way that depression has become possible. You’ve been running and not allowed yourself the time to rest, to relax, and to live your daily life deeply. Spending time each day doing mindful walking can help. Arrange your life so that you can do mindful walking every day.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“The soil of our mind contains many seeds, positive and negative. We are the gardeners who identify, water, and cultivate the best seeds. Touching the seeds of joy, peace, freedom, solidity, and love in ourselves and in each other is an important practice that helps us grow in the direction of health and happiness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“I wouldn’t want to be in a world without any suffering, because then there would be no compassion and understanding either. If you haven’t suffered hunger, you can’t appreciate having something to eat. If you haven’t gone through a war, you don’t know the value of peace. That is why we should not try to run away from one unpleasant thing after another. Holding our suffering, looking deeply into it, and transforming it into compassion, we find a way to happiness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Knowing how to suffer well is essential to realizing true happiness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time. Some say that suffering is only an illusion or that to live wisely we have to “transcend” both suffering and joy. I say the opposite. The way to suffer well and be happy is to stay in touch with what is actually going on; in doing so, you will gain liberating insights into the true nature of suffering and of joy.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“May I be able to live fresh, solid, and free.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“If we know how to handle the little sufferings, we don’t have to suffer on a daily basis. We can practice letting go of what the French call les petites miseres, the little miseries, and save our energy to embrace and soothe the true pains of illness and loss that are unavoidable.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“The hardest thing to practice is not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by despair. When you’re overwhelmed by despair, all you can see is suffering everywhere you look. You feel as if the worst thing is happening to you. But we must remember that suffering is a kind of mud that we need in order to generate joy and happiness. Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“We don’t say that we “hit the bell” or “strike the bell.” Rather, we say we “invite the bell” to sound, because the bell is a friend, an enlightened friend that helps us wake up and guides us home to ourselves. Gentleness and nonviolence are characteristics of the sound of the bell. Its sound is gentle but very powerful. When you hear the sound of the bell, take the opportunity to come home to yourself”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“If we know how to create a moment of happiness, we get to enjoy that happiness ourselves, and we can also double it by sharing it with another person. That is the art of happiness, tasting and delighting in the little happinesses of daily life.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Breathing in, I know I’m alive.” Your eyes still work: “Breathing in, I’m aware of my eyes. Breathing out, I smile to my eyes.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are: there is suffering; there is a course of action that generates suffering; suffering ceases (i.e., there is happiness); and there is a course of action leading to the cessation of suffering (the arising of happiness).”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Allow yourself to sink deeply into the here and the now, because life is possible only in the present, life is available only in the present moment, and you know that you have the capacity to touch life in the present moment, in the here and the now.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Many people suffer due to the fear of dying. We want to live forever. We fear annihilation. We don’t want to pass from being into nonbeing. This is understandable. If you believe that one day you will cease to exist altogether, it can be very scary. But if you take the time to still the activities of body and mind and look deeply, you may see that you are dying right this very moment. You think that you will die in a few years, or twenty years, or thirty years. That’s not true. You are dying now. You have been dying all the time. It’s actually very pleasant to die, which is also to live.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“When I was a young monk, I believed that the Buddha didn’t suffer once he had become enlightened. Naively I asked myself, “What’s the use of becoming a Buddha if you continue to suffer?” The Buddha did suffer, because he had a body, feelings, and perceptions, like all of us. Sometimes he probably had a headache. Sometimes he suffered from rheumatism. If he happened to eat something not well cooked, then he had intestinal problems. So he suffered physically, and he suffered emotionally as well. When one of his beloved students died, he suffered. How can you not suffer when a dear friend has just died? The Buddha wasn’t a stone. He was a human being. But because he had a lot of insight, wisdom, and compassion, he knew how to suffer and so he suffered much less.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“the miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on Earth.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“If you want to experience what the end of suffering will feel like, it is in the here and the now with this breath. If you want nirvana, it’s right here.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Our tendency is to think that if we let go, we’ll lose the things that make us happy. But the opposite is true. The more we let go, the happier we become.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“As long as you continue to compare, you suffer from the fear of coming up short; and, even worse, you keep yourself trapped in a constant, painful delusion of isolation and alienation.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Can I realize my deepest aspiration if I pursue this path?” “What is really preventing me from taking the path I most deeply desire?”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering