50 Famous Quotes by Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher and author who is best known for his book "The Power of Now." His teachings on mindfulness and presence have resonated with millions of people around the world and have helped to inspire a new wave of interest in spirituality and personal growth. Tolle's message is simple but profound: by focusing on the present moment and letting go of our attachment to the past and future, we can find peace and happiness in our lives. (Eckhart Tolle Biography).
Eckhart Tolle Famous Quotes
1. "Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences."
2. "Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour."
3. "Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness."
4. "Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life."
5. "To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness."
6. "The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present."
7. "Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can't stand the suffering anymore."
8. "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."
9. "Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment - a means to an end."
10. "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. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form."
11. "To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment."
12. "Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now."
13. "In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind - in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self."
14. "In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. "
15. "It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up."
16. "Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you"
17. "To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually."
18. "Power over others is weakness disguised as strength."
19. "People don't realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind."
20. "Jesus said, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' I think if he lived nowadays, instead of 'kingdom,' he would have said, 'dimension.' And 'heaven' refers to a sense of vastness or spaciousness."
21. "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."
22. "I'm grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes."
23. "Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you."
24. "Always say 'yes' to the present moment... Surrender to what is. Say 'yes' to life - and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you."
25. "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."
26. "There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself."
27. "The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears."
28. "When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you're waiting for the elevator - instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence."
29. "Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live."
30. "Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts."
31. "Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make."
32. "Memories are thoughts that arise. They're not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it's just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip."
33. "The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity."
34. "I sometimes ask people, 'Can you be aware of your own presence? Not the thoughts that you're having, not the emotions that you're having, but the very presence of your very being?' You become aware of your own presence by sensing the entire energy field in your body that is alive. And that is the totality of your presence."
35. "The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately... you usually don't use it at all. It uses you."
36. "If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small."
37. "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."
38. "You are the universe, you aren't in the universe."
39. "When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you."
40. "Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence."
41. "Thinking is a wonderful tool if it's applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you're dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted."
42. "Thoughts are fine when you don't confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are."
43. "The only thing you ever have is now."
44. "If you are not living this moment, you are not really living."
45. "When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity - what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well."
46. "That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person."
47. "The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one."
48. "If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction."
49. "Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form."
50. "Even the most seemingly unpleasant situations - if you become aligned with it, something good will emerge from that."
― Eckhart Tolle Quotes
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Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
