Eckhart Tolle Quotes

Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The basis for true change is freedom from negativity. And that's what acceptance implies: no negativity about what is. And then you see what this moment requires: what is it that is required now so that life can express itself more fully? ~ Eckhart Tolle

The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without. See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. ~ Eckhart Tolle

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Strictly speaking, "you" cannot become enlightened, because who you take yourself to be is like a ripple in the ocean of consciousness - or a little wave if you're a VIP - and the ripple doesn't become enlightened until it realizes that its ripple-identity is ultimately a misperception, that it is the ocean taking on a fleeting ripple-form. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Problem" means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing you can do now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Evil is an extreme manifestation of human unconsciousness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Significant things often happen when you are present. Things come to you, and then you respond to what is required. The response very often comes without a premeditated idea of what you want. It is simply a response to the situation. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of "I can't be bothered anymore" or "I just don't care anymore." If you look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all but masked resistance. As you surrender, direct your attention inward to check if there is any trace of resistance left inside you. Be very alert when you do so; otherwise, a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in some dark corner in the form of a thought or an unacknowledged emotion. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Feel the Aliveness within your Body. That anchors You in the Now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness. One With Life. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. ~ Eckhart Tolle

God is beyond all the forms of life, but also indwells every form of life as their essence. God is both beyond and within. ~ Eckhart Tolle

To be aware of little, quiet things, you need to be quiet inside. A high degree of alertness is required. Be still. Look. Listen. Be present. ~ Eckhart Tolle

There are situations when all answers and explanations fade. When you fully accept that you do not know, you give up struggling to find answers with the limited thinking mind. That is when the greater intelligence can operate though you. Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Stress is a form of suffering. Look at your body and see what stress does to the body and its functions - what it does to the heart, the circulation, the immune system, the digestive function, the liver. ~ Eckhart Tolle

For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a house, become an expert, make a cup of tea ... Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self - beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.
You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don't interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don't judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something - anything - and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the "isness" of all things. Move deeply into the Now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace
and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When you are not in your body, however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that can live inside you for years, feed on your energy, lead to physical illness, and make your life miserable ~ Eckhart Tolle

War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Above all, the only thing you have to heal is the present thought. Get that right and the whole picture will change into one of harmony and joy. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Peace is your priority, not saving the world. That follows that. ~ Eckhart Tolle

In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive a significant part of their identity, be it negative or positive, from their body. To be more precise, they derive their identity from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body.
Equating the physical sense-perceived body that is destined to grow old, wither and die with 'I' always leads to suffering sooner or later. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Gratefulness for what is there is one of the most powerful tools for creating what is not yet there. What does gratefulness mean? It means you appreciate what is. You value, you give attention to, you honor whatever is here at this moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Focus your attention on the Now and tell me what problem you have at this moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Whatever you do in your business comes out of a state of inner alignment with life and the source of life itself, so peace flows into whatever you do. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Because dogs and cats still live in the original state of connectedness with Being, they can help us regain it. When we do so, however, that original state deepens and turns into awareness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body's direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body's response to thought. Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the filter of a mental interpretation, the future of thought, that is to say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike, me and mine. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The energy form that lies behind hostility and attack finds the presence of love absolutely intolerable. If ~ Eckhart Tolle

Our animal friends' non-reactive and forgiving natures can teach us positive spiritual lessons on a daily basis. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Personally, I don't teach practices as such. The power of the teaching is sufficient without needing to go for any practice. ~ Eckhart Tolle

If not now, when? ~ Eckhart Tolle

Become intensely conscious of the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle

A moment of danger can bring about a temporary cessation of the stream of thinking and thus give you a taste of what it means to be present, alert, aware. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Life wants to support you. But first you need to be open to life. ~ Eckhart Tolle

You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state. ~ Eckhart Tolle

unless you learn to recognize the false as false - as not you - there can be no lasting transformation, and you would always end up being drawn back into illusion and into some form of pain. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The evolutionary impulse is towards disidentification from thinking and the arising of awareness or presence, but the gravitational pull of the old consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, is still quite heavy. It's been around for thousands of years. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When I'm with people, I'm a spiritual teacher. That's the function, but it's not my identity. The moment I'm alone, my deepest joy is to benobody, to relinquish the function of a teacher. It's a temporary function. ~ Eckhart Tolle

That stillness and vastness that enables the Universe to be, is not just out there in space ... it is also within you. ~ Eckhart Tolle

They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer. ~ Eckhart Tolle

In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Whatever is arising in this moment, whatever condition, is part of the isness of life and therefore accepting it fully makes you an expression of the enormous power of life itself-true intelligence, which only comes when you stop obstructing the power of the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle

I meditate. Like probably a lot of people, my mind was opened almost ten years ago with The Secret. From there, I devoured anything Wayne Dyer ever wrote. I listen to him constantly in my car. And Eckhart Tolle. And Paramahansa Yogananda. All this has helped me through the ups and downs of acting and kept me on my path. ~ Graham Shiels

Throughout history humans have inflicted countless violent, cruel, and hurtful acts on each other, and continue to do so. Are they all to be condemned; are they all guilty? Or are those acts simply expressions of unconsciousness, an evolutionary stage that we are now growing out of?
Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Every practice at some point will become a hindrance. No practice can ever take you there, to freedom, to liberation. That's important to realize. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Your primary purpose is to enable consciousness to flow into what you do. The secondary purpose is whatever you want to achieve through the doing. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Thought alone cannot recognize spiritual truths no matter how highly developed thought is. It's impossible. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When you drop your expectations that a person, a situation, a place, or an object should fulfill you, it's easier to be present in this moment because you're no longer looking to the next one. Most people want to get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle

To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river. ~ Eckhart Tolle

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on. ~ Eckhart Tolle

How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change? ~ Eckhart Tolle

If there are people you haven't forgiven, you're not going to really awaken. You have to let go. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. ~ Eckhart Tolle

I would do anything to be anywhere in the vicinity of Eckhart Tolle. ~ Jim Carrey

Stress is extremely harmful to the body. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

present moment holds the key to liberation. ~ Eckhart Tolle

There is nothing more to lose; there is nothing more to fear. Eckhart Tolle says this is "to die before you die," to live life knowing that because one day it'll all be gone, there's really nothing that you have, and so nothing you have to lose. Like ~ Mo Gawdat

No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive. ~ Eckhart Tolle

If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet
highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you're back in time. ~ Eckhart Tolle

In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that give life to the physical body. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The future is only a thought form. Work with the present moment. Be with what is. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Can you feel that there is something in you that is at war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace? ~ Eckhart Tolle

Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body - to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life. The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes. ~ Eckhart Tolle

You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Often suffering is the trigger, or a spiritual teaching, or both. Call it readiness, or grace. This is the beginning of the awakening process. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Being is central, and Being is now. The fulfillment of your life is not going to happen through anything. The outer activities in your life are secondary. What is Primary is Being. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Be aware of your breathing. Notice how this takes attention away from your thinking and creates space. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Whenever you interact with people,don't be there primarily as a function or a role,But as a Field of conscious Presence ~ Eckhart Tolle

Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself."
― Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks ~ Eckhart Tolle

Future success is dependent upon and inseparable from the consciousness out of which the actions emanate ~ Eckhart Tolle

The formless dimension of life is this moment. This moment is timeless and formless - the eternal itself. ~ Eckhart Tolle

You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure conciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity can and does create illnesses in order to strengthen itself through them. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness ~ Eckhart Tolle

The awakening of consciousness is the next evolutionary step for mankind. ~ Eckhart Tolle

If you don't have a good relationship with the now, you don't have a good
relationship with life. ~ Eckhart Tolle

To become aware of the subtlety of nature you need to be alert. The moment you become alert you become still ... thinking subsides. That is actually a higher state of consciousness than thinking. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Every spiritual teaching points to the possibility of the end of suffering - Now. It is true that most teachers have had to go through the "Dark Night of the Soul," although for one or two it was very, very quick. ~ Eckhart Tolle

outside of the structures of the existing institutionalized religions. There were always pockets of spirituality even in mind-dominated religions, although the institutionalized hierarchies felt threatened by them and often ~ Eckhart Tolle

BEAUTY ARISES IN THE STILLNESS OF YOUR PRESENCE ~ Eckhart Tolle

Through right nutrition and exercise. If you don't equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, ~ Eckhart Tolle

Some people get attached to their practice. They get good at it, but even becoming a good meditator can become a hindrance. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event - through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you - ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle

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. ~ Eckhart Tolle