Jack Kornfield - Life Quotes

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To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others.

Jack Kornfield
In all practices and traditions of freedom, we find the heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers, and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion.

Jack Kornfield
Finding a way to extend forgiveness to ourselves is one of our most essential tasks. Just as others have been caught in suffering, so have we. If we look honestly at our life, we can see the sorrows and pain that have led to our own wrongdoing. In this we can finally extend forgiveness to ourselves; we can hold the pain we have caused in compassion. Without such mercy, we will live our own life in exile.

Jack Kornfield
Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole.

Jack Kornfield
The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

Jack Kornfield
This life is a test-it is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. Remember, this life is only a test.

Jack Kornfield
When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.

Jack Kornfield
To see the preciousness of all things, we must bring our full attention to life

Jack Kornfield
Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?

Jack Kornfield
We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life.

Jack Kornfield
It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.

Jack Kornfield
Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.

Jack Kornfield
Meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear, trust the unfolding of life, and you will attain true serenity.

Jack Kornfield
Gratitude is confidence in life itself. In it, we feel how the same force that pushes grass through cracks in the sidewalk invigorates our own life.

Jack Kornfield
To understand ourselves and our life is the point of insight meditation: to understand and to be free.

Jack Kornfield
To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

Jack Kornfield
In a society that almost demands life at double time, speed and addictions numb us to our own experience. In such a society, it is almost impossible to settle into our bodies or stay connected with our hearts, let alone connect with one another or the earth where we live.

Jack Kornfield
When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. The ocean of life rises and falls within us - birth and death, joy and pain, it is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all.

Jack Kornfield
We don't know all the reasons that propel us on a spiritual journey, but somehow our life compels us to go.

Jack Kornfield
When we come into the present, we begin to feel the life around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding. We must have the courage to face whatever is present - our pain, our desires, our grief, our loss, our secret hopes our love - everything that moves us most deeply.

Jack Kornfield
The purpose of spiritual life is not to create some special state of mind. A state of mind is always temporary. The purpose is to work directly with the most primary elements of our body and our mind, to see the ways we get trapped by our fears, desires, and anger, to learn directly our capacity for freedom.

Jack Kornfield
One of the essential tasks for living a wise life is letting go. Letting go is the path to freedom. It is only by letting go of the hopes, the fears, the pain, the past, the stories that have a hold on us that we can quiet our mind and open our heart.

Jack Kornfield
As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life.

Jack Kornfield
There is a web of life into which we are born, from which we can never fall.

Jack Kornfield
We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy—material or spiritual.

Jack Kornfield