Attention leads to immortality. Carelessness leads to death. Those who pay attention will not die, while the careless are as good as dead already.

Foolish, ignorant people indulge in careless lives, whereas a clever man guards his attention as his most precious possession.

Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha.

If you have time to be mindful, you have time to meditate.

A friend of mine drinks a lot of whiskey and is concened about how this will affect his path.
Thich Naht Hahn replied: "Thats OK if he drinks mindfully, he will realise what it is doing, and will gradualy stop drinking

One day the Buddha held up a flower in front of an audience of 1,250 monks and nuns. he did not say anything for quite a long time. The audience was perfectly silent. Everyone seemed to be thinking hard, trying to see the meaning behind the Buddha's gesture. Then, suddenly, the Buddha smiled. He smiled because someone in the audience smiled at him and at the flower.... To me the meaning is quite simple. When someone holds up a flower and shows it to you, he wants you to see it. If you keep thinking, you miss the flower. The person who was not thinking, who was just himself, was able to encounter the flower in depth, and he smiled.
That is the problem of life. If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.
Peace Is Every Step

Mindfulness is the energy that helps us to be truly present. When you are truly present, you are more in control of situations, you have more love, patience, understanding, and compassion. That strengthens and improves your quality of being. It can be very healing to touch your true nature of no-self. Psychotherapy can learn a lot from this teaching.
Answers from the Heart: Practical Responses to Burning Questions

While I was in Malaysia, I saw a T-shirt depicting a surfboard aloft huge waves. Sitting on the surfboard was a figure meditating cross-legged. The slogan read, "Riding the waves of life, be mindful, be happy." That's it. Awareness. Being present. Knowing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions. It's just like riding a surfboard. You gradually develop the poise to cruise along on the roughest seas until, no longer immersed in the waves, you are riding on top of them. Of course you have to start with small waves until you get your balance. Then the higher the wave, the better! Likewise, when we begin to train in awareness, it is better if we have an atmosphere which is nonthreatening and peaceful. That's why people go on retreat. That's also a reason why people set aside regular sitting periods. But once we learn how to be balanced, we become like a surfer who finds that the bigger the wave, the greater the fun.
Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism

When we rush in with this mental chatter, we are no longer being mindful. We are just thinking about being mindful. Mindfulness is not thinking about, it is being present and actually knowing in the moment without any mental commentary. If commentary begins to happen, we simply ignore it and return to being present in the moment. Think about this. There are so many things happening in our lives that we never really experience. We experience only ideas, interpretations, and comparisons. We dwell on things that happened in the past or anticipate future events. But we almost never experience the moment itself. It is for this reason that we often find our lives boring and meaningless. What we need to realize is that this sense of meaninglessness does not come from our lives, but from the quality of awareness with which we live our lives.
Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism

Meditation is bringing the mind back home, and this is first achieved through the practice of mindfulness.
Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how to meditate. He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she drew water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.

When I teach meditation, I often begin by saying: “Bring your mind home. And release. And relax.”
To bring your mind home means to bring the mind into the state of Calm Abiding through the practice of mindfulness. In its deepest sense, to bring your mind home is to turn your mind inward and rest in the nature of mind. This itself is the highest meditation.
To release means to release the mind from its prison of grasping, since you recognize that all pain and fear and distress arise from the craving of the grasping mind. On a deeper level, the realization and confidence that arise from your growing understanding of the nature of mind inspire the profound and natural generosity that enables you to release all grasping from your heart, letting it free itself to melt away in the inspiration of meditation.
To relax means to be spacious and to relax the mind of its tensions. More deeply, you relax into the true nature of your mind, the state of Rigpa. It is like pouring a handful of sand onto a hot surface, and each grain settles of its own accord. This is how you relax into your true nature, letting all thoughts and emotions naturally subside and dissolve into the state of the nature of mind.

The practice of mindfulness unveils and reveals your essential Good Heart, because it dissolves and removes the unkindness or the harm in you. Only when you have removed the harm in yourself do you become truly useful to others. Through the practice, by slowly removing the unkindness and harm from yourself, you allow your true Good Heart, the fundamental goodness and kindness that are your real nature, to shine out and become the warm climate in which your true being flowers.
This is why I call meditation the true practice of peace, the true practice of nonaggression and nonviolence, and the real and greatest disarmament.

The practice of mindfulness defuses our negativity, aggression, and turbulent emotions, which may have been gathering power over many lifetimes. Rather than suppressing emotions or indulging in them, here it is important to view them—your thoughts and whatever arises—with an acceptance and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible. Tibetan masters say that this wise generosity has the flavor of boundless space, so warm and cozy that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as if by a blanket of sunlight.

Gradually, as you remain open and mindful, and use a technique to focus your mind more and more, your negativity will slowly be defused; you begin to feel well in your own skin, or, as the French say, être bien dans sa peau (“well in your own skin”). From this comes release and a profound ease. I think of this practice as the most effective form of therapy and self-healing.