Jack Kornfield

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

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

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

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

Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in. It could cost our reputation in history as the nation distinct from all others in our achievements, our identity, and our enduring influence on mankind. Our values are central to all three.

They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.