Jack Kornfield

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.