Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes (the Art of Communicating)

I’ve been reading The Art of Communicating, by Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ve loved so much of what he shared in his lifetime, yet I’ve been slow to read his books in full (so I’m trying to change that). This book has mesmerized me so much that I want to pause to soak in his beautiful quotes below about this art we are all learning—communication…

---

“Where I live in Plum Village, every time you meet someone on your way somewhere, you join your palms and bow to him or to her with respect, because you know that there is a Buddha inside that person. Even if that person isn’t looking or acting like a Buddha, the capacity for love and compassion is in him or her. If you know how to bow with respect and freshness, you can help the Buddha in him or her to come out. To join your palms and bow like this isn’t mere ritual. It’s a practice of awakening.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Nothing can survive without food. Everything we consume acts either to heal us or to poison us. We tend to think of nourishment only as what we take in through our mouths, but what we consume with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, and our bodies is also food. The conversations going on around us, and those we participate in, are also food. Are we consuming and creating the kind of food that is healthy for us and helps us grow?”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“In a relationship, we are nourishment for each other. So we have to select the kind of food we offer the other person, the kind of food that can help our relationships thrive.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Every day we can say something that has the capacity to heal and help people. A grown-up can do this. A child can do this. A businessperson, a politician, or a teacher can do this. We don't need to wait for a special moment.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you produce a thought that is full of understanding, forgiveness, and compassion, that thought will immediately have a healing effect on both your physical and mental health and on those around you. If you think a thought that is full of judgment and anger, that thought will immediately poison your body and mind and the people around you.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“What you read and write can help you heal, so be thoughtful about what you consume. When you write an e-mail or a letter that is full of understanding and compassion, you are nourishing yourself during the time you write that letter. Even if it’s just a short note, everything you’re writing down can nourish you and the person to whom you are writing.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Self-understanding is crucial for understanding another person; self-love is crucial for loving others. When you’ve understood your suffering, you suffer less, and you are capable of understanding another person’s suffering much more easily. When you can recognize the suffering in the other person and see how that suffering came about, compassion arises. You no longer have the desire to punish or blame the other person. You can listen deeply, and when you speak there is compassion and understanding in your speech. The person with whom you’re speaking will feel much more comfortable, because there is understanding and love in your voice.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Nourishing and healing communication is the food of our relationships. Sometimes one cruel utterance can make the other person suffer for many years, and we will suffer for many years too.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you speak, allow the insight of our collective humanity to speak through you. When you walk, don't walk for yourself alone; walk for your ancestors and your community. When you breathe, allow the larger world to breathe for you.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“When your loved one is suffering, your impulse may be to want to do something to fix it, but you don’t need to do much. You just need to be there for him or her. That is true love. True love is made of mindfulness.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Knowing how to handle suffering, you know at the same time how to produce happiness. And if you’re truly happy, we all profit from your happiness. We need happy people in this world.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“If you arrive at your workplace having already practiced mindfulness while getting ready at home and while on your way, you'll arrive happier and more relaxed than you have in the past, and successful communication will come a lot more easily.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Don't expect to change your work environment overnight. But if you make a diligent effort to practice compassionate communication, both with yourself and with your colleagues, you're taking steps in the right direction, and that is good enough.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Thinking can push you to do or say things that are destructive, or it can create a lot of love. Every thought will bring a fruit, sometimes right away, sometimes later on. When you produce a thought of hate, anger, or despair, that thought is a poison which will affect your body and your mind. A thought of hatred or anger can lead one person to hurt another. If you commit a violent act, it means you’ve been producing thoughts of hatred, anger, and the desire to punish.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“When we see that some suffering or some pain is coming up, we don't try to run away from it. In fact, we have to go back and take care of it.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“With mindful awareness, we can look into the nature of our suffering and find out what kind of food we have been supplying to keep it alive. When we find the source of nourishment for our suffering, we can cut off that supply, and our suffering will fade.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“If you don’t communicate well with yourself, you cannot communicate well with another person. Come back again and again and communicate lovingly with yourself. That is the practice. You have to go back to yourself and listen to the happiness you may have in this moment; listen to the suffering in your body and in your mind, and learn how to embrace it and bring relief.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“By listening compassionately to yourself, you have started to come home to yourself.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“But the path back home is not long. Home is inside us. Going home requires only sitting down and being with yourself, accepting the situation as it is. Yes, it might be a mess in there, but we accept it because we know we have left home for a long time. So now we’re home. With our in-breath and our out-breath, our mindful breathing, we begin to tidy up our homes.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“So we accept ourselves with all our weaknesses, and then we have peace. We don’t judge ourselves; we accept. I have these qualities and these weaknesses, but I will try to improve slowly, at my speed.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Then our communication with others will be based on the desire to understand rather than the desire to prove ourselves right or make ourselves feel better. We will have only the intention to help.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“When we have the ability to listen with compassion to the suffering of the other person, we will benefit as well. Our compassion makes us happy and peaceful. When we listen with compassion, we can understand things that we wouldn’t be able to understand if we were full of anger.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“It's okay if you're not ready to listen at a certain moment. If the quality of your listening is not good enough, it's better to pause and continue another day; don't push yourself too hard. Practice mindful breathing and mindful walking until you're ready to really listen to the other person. You can say, "I want to listen to you when I'm at my best. Would it be all right if we continued tomorrow?”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“In any relationship, you may want to check whether you have understood the other person. If it is a relationship that is harmonious, in which communication is good, then happiness is there. If communication and harmony exist, it means mutual understanding is there. Don’t wait until the other person has left or is full of anger to ask the important question “Do you think I understand you enough?” The other person will tell you if you haven’t understood enough. He will know if you’re able to listen with compassion. You may say, “Please tell me, please help me. Because I know very well that if I don’t understand you, I will make a lot of mistakes.” That is the language of love.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“You may learn that your partner has many wrong perceptions about you and about the situation, but try not to interrupt. Let her speak. Let her have a chance to speak out everything in her so she can feel listened to and understood. As your partner speaks, continue to breathe mindfully. Later on you may find a way to undo her misunderstanding, little by little in a very skillful, loving way, and mutual understanding will grow.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“The truth is a solid base for a long-lasting relationship. If you don't build your relationship on the truth, sooner or later it will crumble. We have to find the best way to tell the truth so that the other person can receive it easily. Sometimes even the most skillful words can cause pain. That is okay. Pain can heal. If your words are spoken with compassion and understanding, the pain will heal more quickly.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Right Speech requires being true to your word and not changing the content for your own advantage or to portray yourself in a better light.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“The first element of Right Speech is to tell the truth. We don't lie. We try not to say untruthful things. If we think the truth is too shocking, we find a skillful and loving way to tell the truth. But we have to respect the truth.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“There are many ways to tell the truth. It’s an art.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“1. Tell the truth. Don’t lie or turn the truth upside down. 2. Don’t exaggerate. 3. Be consistent. This means no double-talk: speaking about something in one way to one person and in an opposite way to another for selfish or manipulative reasons. 4. Use peaceful language. Don’t use insulting or violent words, cruel speech, verbal abuse, or condemnation.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“The foundation of love is understanding, and that means first of all understanding suffering. Each of us is hungry for understanding”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“When we’re still young, many of us are determined to be different from our parents. We say we’ll never make our children suffer. But when we grow up we tend to behave just like our parents, and we make others suffer because, like our ancestors, we don’t know how to handle the energies we’ve inherited. We’ve received many positive and negative seeds from our parents and ancestors. They transmitted their habit to us because they didn’t know how to transform it.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“In long-term relationships, as in families, we often get in the habit of thinking that change isn't possible. We think the other person should change and they won't, so we give up hope. But we need to stop judging and return to our own internal communication. If we wait for our parents or our partner to change, it may take a very long time. If we wait for the other person to change, we may spend all our time waiting. So it's better to change yourself. Don't try to force the other person to change. Even if it takes a long time, you will feel better when you are master of yourself and you are doing your best.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“Our communication is what we put out into the world and what remains after we have left. In this way, our communication is our karma. The Sanskrit word karma means "action," and it refers not just to bodily action but to what we express with our bodies, our words, and our thoughts and intentions.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh