Eckhart Tolle Quotes

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection - you cannot cope with the future.

Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.

A huge number of people are going through the process of awakening, some in the early stages, some in later stages, and it's wonderful to see.

When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

The moment you realize you are not present, you are present.

When you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.

If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

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.

To have your attention in the Now is not a denial of what is needed in your life. It is recognition of what is primary.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Work to recognize the primary importance of the present moment.

This is my secret," he said. "I don't mind what happens.

The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions.

Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.

Music bypasses the conceptual mind. Music does not give you food for thought.

Being must be felt. It can't be thought.

I've received more and more emails from teachers saying that they are beginning to teach presence in their classroom without necessarily calling it that or calling it anything, not as part of the official curriculum. It's like an underground movement not yet officially recognized by the educational authorities - at least not as far as I know!

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.

A person dies, or something you had identified with completely is gone. Your home goes up in flames. There is extreme pain at first. But whenever a form dissolves, which is called "death," what remains is an opening into emptiness.

Things are both getting better and getting worse. The madness is accelerating but an acceleration of the new consciousness is also coming in. However, this latter development is less apparent when you listen to the media. The media still mostly reflects what is happening in the sphere of the old consciousness.

Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.

"Going with the flow" is for some people an excuse for not taking action and it refers usually to one's life situation.

Surrender is the inner transition from resistance to acceptance, from no to yes.

Ask yourself what problem you have right now. Not next year, tomorrow or five minutes from now. You can always cope with the now, but you can never cope with the future. Nor do you have to. The answer, the strength and the right action will be there when you need it. Not before or after.

It is important to realize that a large percentage of what we hear or see on the news focuses on those places where there is violent conflict...It gives us a slightly or very distorted view of what is going on because there are many other parts of the planet where there is no violent conflict, but that is not on the news.

What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. 'Who am I, then?' The one who sees that.

Any action that arises out of stress is of low quality, and it contributes to human suffering. You are making yourself and others suffer.

Be alert as you watch a dog at play or at rest. Let the animal teach you to feel at home in the now, to celebrate life by being completely present. You just watch the tail ... with some dogs you just look at them - just a little look is enough - and their tail goes ...'Life is good! Life is good!' And they are not telling themselves a story of why life is good. It's a direct realization.

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it's measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.

By far the greater part of violence that humans inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens service of the collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet "normal" equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego.

Challenges are something that can only be tackled in the present moment and require action.

Whenever you are engaged in something and there is an outpouring of energy, you are in enthusiasm.

When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.

So one could say that the only real problem is dysfunctional thinking, the rest are challenges, not problems.

When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you.

As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives.

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

The significance is hiding in the insignificant. Appreciate everything.

The primary purpose of life is in being in the NOW.

Some people thought I was crazy to have let go of all the worldly things I had "achieved." They didn't understand that I didn't want or need any of that anymore.

Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly.

The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection.

I never went out and said, "I want to do this." I never do that. I wait for things to come to me, either within or without, and I go along with it.

The power of movies lies in the fact that it enables the viewer to enter the reality, to some extent, of the characters.

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.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

If you have a strong ego [and] something good happens to an acquaintance of yours, [it] makes you feel bad. It's called envy. ... The ego thinks something has been taken away from you because somebody else has received something good. It's a complete illusion, but that's the madness of the ego.

Nothing that you plan is going to work out. Everything is going to be totally different than the way you expected. And things will constantly challenge you. Wherever you look the world is not as solid it seems to be.

When you make the present moment, instead of past and future, the focal point of your life, your ability to enjoy what you do and with it the quality of your life increases dramatically.

Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger

Become conscious of being conscious.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action-just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.

The voice in your head also creates a huge amount of problems that aren't really problems. They're just things that haven't happened yet, things that could happen tomorrow or next week. Listening to unreal problems has another name: worrying. That's what the voice in your head does. It what-ifs. It frets. It agonizes, and you can no longer sense the joy of life.

If you find here & now intolerable, you have options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

Something inside you emerges....an innate, indwelling peace, stillness, aliveness. It is the unconditioned, who you are in your essence. It is what you had been looking for in the love object. It is yourself.

Life always is now. Life is inseparable from now.