Home > Work > Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
41 " No blame, noreasoning, no argument, just understanding. If youunderstand, and you show that you understand, you canlove, and the situation will change. "
― Thich Nhat Hanh , Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
42 " When you hold a child in your arms, or hug your mother, or your husband, or your friend, if you breathe in and out three times, your happiness will be multiplied at least tenfold. "
43 " If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today "
44 " Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what's the use of seeing? "
45 " The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives -- the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods. "
46 " Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible fo everything that happens around us. "
47 " We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. "
48 " During the past few years I have avoided tiring myself and losing my breath. I must take care of my body, treat it with respect as a musician does his instrument. I apply nonviolence to my body, for it is not merely a tool to accomplish something. It itself is the end. "
49 " Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice. "
50 " Peace is every step. "
51 " Anger is rooted in our lack of understanding of ourselves and of the causes, deep-seated as well as immediate, that brought about this unpleasant state of affairs. Anger is also rooted in desire, pride, agitation, and suspicion. The primary roots of our anger are in ourselves. Our environment and other people are only secondary. "
52 " Our senses are our windows to the world, and sometimes the wind blows through them and disturbs everything within us. Some of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sights and sounds of the world to invade us, penetrate us, and expose our sad, troubled selves. "
53 " What we need are people who are capable [...] of not taking sides so that they can embrace the whole of reality. "
54 " Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others. "
55 " Lev dig in i tanken att du finns i universum och att universum finns i dig. Om universum finns, finns du. Om du finns, finns universum. Det finns ingen födelse. Det finns ingen död. "
56 " 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. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her. "
57 " Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Wonderful moment. "
58 " we are very good at preparing to live but not very good at living. we can spend 10 yrs to get a diploma or a degree, car, job but have difficulty remembering that we are alive. every breathe we take can be filled with joy, peace, serenity. we only need to be awake and alive in the moment. "
59 " Everything we do is an act of poetry or a painting if we do it with mindfulness. Growing lettuce is poetry. Walking to the supermarket can be a painting. When we do not trouble ourselves about whether or not something is a work of art, if we just act in each moment with composure and mindfulness, each minute of our life is a work of art. Even when we are not painting or writing, we are still creating. We are pregnant with beauty, joy, and peace, and we are making life more beautiful for many people. "
60 " Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us--to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here. "