Jack Kornfield Quotes

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.

Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. In India they use the word “karma” for lack of any better term. But it’s a concept that’s rarely given a proper explanation. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

Nothing is to come, and nothing past: But an eternal now, does always last.

We are tomorrow's past.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess? ... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.

And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.

Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.