Jack Kornfield Quotes

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

Compassion enables you to reach to the heavens and look through the heart of God.

Not only are we going to shift in our own lives - away from always trying to identify ourselves on the basis of what we have, what we do, and who we are better than, and so on - but shift into more reaching out, more service, more kindness, more living the virtues that Lao Tzu spoke about twenty-five hundred years ago.

There is no true joy in a life lived closed up in the little shell of the self. When you take one step to reach out to people, when you meet with others and share their thoughts and sufferings, infinite compassion and wisdom well up within your heart. Your life is transformed.

Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know I am moving from fear to love.

You cease to move into yourself, away from others. You give up your antagonism. You begin to move toward others in love. God moved toward you in gracious, outgoing love, and you move toward others in that same outgoing love.

I, for one, am profoundly grateful to feel the hand of God at work in my life. But at the beginning and end of the day, when my default setting is to show kindness and love to others, I never regret it. And to me, that is what faith is all about.

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.

It's often difficult for us to act compassionately, but sacred art eases the difficulty by ennobling us.

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

I often write about nonreligious people, and I try to find situations where their sense of humanity is restored or discovered. I think you can be a good person in many ways. And I think you often have to be careful that prayer can seem superficial, because it's a very complicated thing to love your neighbor as yourself.

Compassion is not defined in one form. There's no Indian compassion. There's no American compassion. It transcends nation, the gender, the age. Why? Because it is there in everybody. It's experienced by people occasionally.

If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love's reach.

I know that some of the spiritual beliefs that I have are that if I come from a place of love, and I try to get out of my ego and my desire to want more and be selfish in any shape or form, then whatever I'm doing is not good.

Jesus had a universal concern for those who suffered that transcended the rules of the ancient world.

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

We experience God to the extent to which we love, forgive, and focus on the good in others and ourselves.

I don't think I could truly value human love until I developed divine love.

I'm a really strong guy. I can deal with a lot of things. But I can't deal with anybody suffering.

If we show people that fear isn't actually the place that we have to surrender to, fear isn't actually the thing that we have to answer to, but instead, it's going in and loving people.

I love Oprah, she's my hero in terms of a lot of things - what's not to love about Oprah? When I look at Oprah, I see all heart. She's wide open.

It is easy to underestimate the demands of an open heart.

Religions have found that if you behave in a certain way, if you sort of perform certain rituals that expand your mind and make you realize that will make you realize and help you to seguey into transcendence and perform certain acts, adopt a certain lifestyle, you develop new capacities of mind and heart, just like the dancer, or the athlete that make you into a whole human being and principle after one of these disciplines right across the board in all of the faiths is compassion, the ability to feel with the other person.

I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love - nothing else.