Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jack Kornfield

We can bring our spiritual practice into the streets, into our communities, when we see each realm as a temple, as a place to discover that which is sacred.

Jack Kornfield

Taking the one seat describes two related aspects of spiritual work. Outwardly, it means selecting one practice and teacher among all the possibilities, and inwardly, it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding.

Jack Kornfield

The longing for initiation is universal and for modern youth, it is a desperate need. When nothing is offered in the way of spiritual initiation to prove one's entry into the world of men and women, initiation happens instead in the road or the street, in cars at high speed, with drugs, with dangerous sex, with weapons. However troubling, this behavior is rooted in a fundamental truth; a need to grow.

Jack Kornfield

It is the basic principle of spiritual life that we learn the deepest things in unknown territory. Often it is when we feel most confused inwardly and are in the midst of our greatest difficulties that something new will open. We awaken most easily to the mystery of life through our weakest side. The areas of our greatest strength, where we are the most competent and clearest, tend to keep us away from the mystery.

Jack Kornfield

Yet I knew that spiritual practice is impossible without great dedication, energy, and commitment.

Jack Kornfield

An honorable spiritual practice recognizes the losses we have suffered, tells our story, and sheds our tears to free us from the past.

Jack Kornfield

For most of us, generosity is a quality that must be developed. We have to respect that it will grow gradually; otherwise our spirituality can become idealistic and imitative, acting out the image of generosity before it has become genuine.

Jack Kornfield

The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding an gradual training.

Jack Kornfield

Where we tended to be judgmental, we became more judgmental of ourselves in our spiritual practice.

Jack Kornfield

...Spiritual opening is not a withdrawal to some imagined realm or safe cave. It is not a pulling away, but a touching of all the experience of life with wisdom and with a heart of kindness, without any separation.

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

To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.

Jack Kornfield

Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.

Jack Kornfield

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

Jack Kornfield

All of spiritual practice is a matter of relationship: to ourselves, to others, to life's situations.

Jack Kornfield

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

Jack Kornfield

To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.

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

Spiritual life doesn't make you a good person; you ARE a good person, you are a holy being when you are born. What spiritual life does is remind us that this is who we really are.

Jack Kornfield

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

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.

J. Edgar Hoover

The flames of freedom which were lighted across this great land of ours in Thomas Jefferson's day have continued to burn with an intense and magnetic light for nearly 200 years. They have been fed by the spiritual fuel which abounds only in a land where an abiding faith in God and recognition of Him as the true Author of Liberty prevail.

J. D. Salinger

I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to.

J. I. Packer

Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.

J. I. Packer

The Holy Spirit is God the evangelist.

J. I. Packer

Scripture is the most up-to-date and relevant reading that ever comes my way.

J. I. Packer

The Spirit is not given to make Bible study needless, but to make it effective.

J. I. Packer

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God.

It took the tenacity and spirit of thousands and thousands of women who worked in an unrelenting way for many, many years.

Mao Zedong

Once all struggles are grasped, miracles are possible.

Lucy Larcom

Sometimes it seems to me that God 's way of dealing with me is not to let me see much of my friends, those who are most to me in the spiritual life, lest I should forget that the invisible bond is the only reality. That is the only way I can reconcile myself to the inevitable separations of life and death.

Louise Bogan

But is there any reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? Is it not possible for a woman to come to terms with herself if not with the world; to withdraw more and more, as time goes on, her own personality from her productions; to stop childish fears of death and eschew charming rebellions against facts?

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.