Eckhart Tolle Quotes

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251 Quotes for Inner Stillness and Deep Connection with the Present Moment

“The pas has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.”

“True Power is within, and it is available now.”

“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.”

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.”

“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.”

“And then there is the universal role of adult. When you play that role, you take yourself and life very seriously. Spontaneity, lightheartedness, and joy are not part of that role.”

“You are awareness, disguised as a person.”

“Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet”

“Man Made 'God' in his own image. The eternal, the infinate, the unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as 'my god' or 'our god'.”

“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.”

“Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.”

“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.”

“In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.”

“A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.”

“Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.”

“If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.”

“… there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.”

“The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.”

“The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be…”

“You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next.”

“The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.”

“When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?”

“All artists, whether they know it or not create from a place of inner stillness, a place of no mind.”

“Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.”

“What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.”

“whatever you fight, you strengthyen. What you resist, persists. "A New Earth":War is a mind set”

“You are not your mind”

“Your presence, your consciousness”

“Presence is a state of inner spaciousness.”

“When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements. Yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion which is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none.
The truth is you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear. As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds?”

““I am bored.” Who knows this?
“I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this?
You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.”

“Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness.”

“Instead of asking "what do I want from life?", a more powerful question is, "what does life want from me?"”

“Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer?”

“Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment, and imagine living your whole life like that. Always, this moment is not quite good enough because you need to get to the next one.”

“To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.”

“On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.”

“You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.”

“Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word.”

“If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. “How” is always more important than “what.” See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.”

“When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.”

“Every outer purpose is doomed to “fail” sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things.”

“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.”

“The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.”

“Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.”

“By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form.”

“The ego … reduces the present to a means to an end.”

“The more unconscious individuals, groups, or nations are, the more likely it is that egoic pathology will assume the form of physical violence. Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right or another wrong. With very unconscious people, arguments can easily lead to physical violence.”

“… the ego's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between me and the other, without which it cannot survive.”