Eckhart Tolle Quotes
- Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.
2. Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
3. True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
4. Don’t seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.
5. Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
6. Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.
7. Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
8. Anything “bad” that happens in your life — use it for enlightenment.
9. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.
10. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem, and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
11. Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.
12. Your life is now.
13. Failures lies concealed in every success in every failure.
14. Become conscious of being conscious.
15. Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.
16. Wherever you are, be there totally.
17. The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
18. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
19. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
20. Stop looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love – you have a treasure within that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
21. Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
22. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no mind, from inner stillness.
23. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next.
24. Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.
25. You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
26. On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.
27. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.
28. Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.
29. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
30. The foundation of greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment, instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.
31. What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly.
32. Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world
33. When you accept what is, every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment.
34. For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
35. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
36. You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes.
37. You have so much to learn from your enemies.
38. Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth.
39. Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
40. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
41. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
42. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life — to allow life to live through you.
43. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.
44. The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts.
45. As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pains and problems, we will never be free from them.
46. Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
47. True Power is within, and it is available now.
48. If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.
49. Just watching an animal closely can take you out of your mind and bring you into the present moment, which is where the animal lives all the time — surrendered to life.
50. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
51. When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.
52. All problems are illusions of the mind.
53. In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.
54. Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.
55. If not now, when?
56. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation.
57. Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.
58. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
59. The past has no power over the present moment
60. What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.
61. You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.
62. Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.
63. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.
64. You are a human mind again, pretending to be a human being, interacting with another mind, playing a drama called “love.”
65. This, too, will pass.
66. Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
67. When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak, and act differently.
68. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it
69. To love is to recognize yourself in another.
70. Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.
71. Practice presence — embrace the place where life happens.
72. Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
73. Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.
74. Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
75. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. … The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
76. You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.”
77. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.
78. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
79. You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.
80. Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
81. Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.
82. When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life.
83. The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.
84. The moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.
85. Whatever you accept completely, you go beyond…If you fight it, you’re stuck with it.
86. The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.
87. The significance is hiding in the insignificant. Appreciate everything.
88. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
89. Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there”.
90. Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
91. The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.
92. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.
93. Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.
94. When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.
95. Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.
96. Stillness is the only thing in this world that has no form. But then, it is not really a thing, and it is not of this world.”
97. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
98. Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is — no matter what form it takes — you are still, you are at peace.
99. Doing is never enough if you neglect Being.
100. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but the thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.
101. Most people don’t know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.
102. Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.
103. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
104. You are awareness, disguised as a person.
105. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
106. Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
107. The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction.
108. Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.
109. When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.
110. Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.
111. Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.
112. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.
113. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
114. If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.
115. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
116. All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.
117. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.
118. To recognize one’s own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
119. Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose
120. Everything is honored, but nothing matters.
121. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
122. Don’t Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness
123. The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes.
124. Just as the dog loves to chew bones, the human mind loves its problems.
125. What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
126. Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
127. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.
128. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species.
129. What it doesn’t say — but only points to — is more important than what it says.
130. You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state.
