Eckhart Tolle Quotes

“All problems are illusions of the mind.”

“When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.”

“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.”

“When you always want the next thing, every human being becomes a means to an end.”

“Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now, and if the past cant prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”

“When you listen to the voice in your head, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.”

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

“Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.”

“When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.”

“To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present.”

“Just as the dog loves to chew bones, the human mind loves its problems.”

“For most people on the planet, consciousness can be equated with thought. They haven't experienced what it means to be conscious without thought, or they have only for very brief instants.”

“In the unawakened state you don't use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of years. You don't see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns.”

“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.”

“Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it's always now. It's all there is. And if you continuously miss the now - resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments - the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself.”

“Life is now. There was never a timewhen your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”

“Don't think of yourself as having a past, don't think of yourself as having a future. What's left?”

“When there's somebody there who is transparent enough so that the stillness comes through unhindered, there's a reciprocal movement in you because the presence of stillness suddenly recognizes itself.”

“Humans eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Suddenly, they start cutting reality up into bits and pieces, which is what the thinking mind does.”

“Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.”

“The foundation of greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment, instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.”

“By learning to accept the small things immediately as they happen, you can be free of having to react to things at all. You still can respond when action is needed, but you can be free, internally, of events.”

“The animals certainly like to be close to humans, especially as humans go through the shift in consciousness.”

“It is the stillness that will save and transform the world.”

“Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel.”