Quotes by Eckhart Tolle

Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it.

To love is to recognize yourself in another.

When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously, even if it's just gratitude for breathing, gratitude for the aliveness that you feel in your body. Gratitude is there when you acknowledge the aliveness of the present moment.

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.

True happiness is found in simple, seemingly unremarkable things.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.

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

Make peace with the present moment.

Love is a state of being.

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

Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.

Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents.

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.

A work of art comes out of a state of deep stillness.

The moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

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.

The other person's presence ultimately is the same as your presence, because it is in presence that there is true meeting.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

The world can only change from within.

Stay present, stay conscious.

Accept -- then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

The future is an imagined now, a projection of the mind.

Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present.

Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.

Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continually pass away.

Pain is the fuel that lights the flame of our enlightenment.

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.

Now is all you ever have. There never is anything else. So, you might as well make the now your friend. Otherwise, you are out of alignment with life itself.

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.

It is not necessary to do things in a state of anxiety or anguish. That is not the way to be aligned with life.

There's something in everybody that longs for that awakening to be more true to yourself.

You need to learn to be with the suffering that inevitably arises in your life.

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

Once bliss becomes normal it's no longer bliss, it's just peace.

Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be powerfully transformative. And it's free.

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.

Even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't seek to become free or desire or achieve enlightenment. Become present.

We are destined not to go back to the level of animals that we've come from but to return to being by going beyond thinking.

What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light.

You are not seeking to attain some future state. That is the fallacy of many spiritual seekers. They have an image of some state -- enlightenment, or whatever they call it -- they want to achieve.

Doing is never enough if you neglect Being.

Let the end of the world be inside you, then you don't need to fear the end of the world out there.

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.

The ego always looks toward the next moment for some kind of fulfillment.

I don't pray for anything, but I have used affirmations in the past a few times. They are really a bit more like realizations in that on some level they have already happened.

There is no separation between being and the manifested world, between the manifested and the unmanifested. But the unmanifested is so much vaster, deeper, and greater than what happens in the manifested.

Only when you've truly had enough suffering in your life, are you able to say ' I don't need it anymore'.

Not all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become I.

When you know who you truly are, there is an abiding alive sense of peace.
You could call it joy because that's what joy is: vibrantly alive peace. It is the joy of knowing yourself as the very life essence before life takes on form. That is the joy of Being -- of being who you truly are.

There have been many people for whom limitations, failure, loss, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility and compassion. It made them more real.

In certain extreme cases, medication may be necessary. But it is given far too often, too easily, and too readily. Millions of children already are on tranquilizers, for example, and that is absurd.

Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever since they fell from the state of grace, entered the realm of time and mind, and lost awareness of Being. At that point, they started to perceive themselves as meaningless fragments in an alien universe, unconnected to the Source and to each other.

Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.

Be present as the watcher of your mind- of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.

The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.

You cannot have a desire to surrender because that's non-surrender. Surrender arises spontaneously sometimes in people who don't even have a word for it. And I know that openness is there in many people.

The vital function that pets fulfill in this world hasn't been fully recognized.
They keep millions of people sane. They have become Guardians of Being.

The vital function that pets fulfill in this world hasn't been fully recognized. They keep millions of people sane.

You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains you for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms.

The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't make it any less insane.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

If I find here and Now unacceptable, I have three choices:

1-Totally accept it.

2- Change it.

3-Remove myself from the situation.

That is taking responsibility for my life.

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

Silence is helpful, but you don't need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.

Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.

True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship.

Stillness is your essential nature.

When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it anymore. Presence is the key. Now is the key.

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.

The thing that gives you power also traps you.

Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.

I sometimes say to people, I am a window frame -- no more. The window frame is not that important. What is important is the light that comes through the window.

Visualisation works most powerfully when you realize that it is already a reality on the unseen level. It's already there.

Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.

The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.

Evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species.

Just watching an animal closely can take you out of your mind and bring you into the present moment, which is where the animal lives all the time -- surrendered to life.

Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame, there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.

If your mind is still... You can sense the peace that emanates from the earth.

Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy, and all you have to do is 'ride the wave'.

If people believe the world is here to satisfy them, whenever they begin to encounter their limitations, they become unhappy.

The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.

The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.

I sometimes say animals are closer to God than humans. They are closer to the source. The humans are more lost in the mind forms. Being is more obscured to the human because of the overlay of ego and mental formation.

You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.

Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments.

Actually, the ability to choose presence depends on the degree of presence that's emerging in you. Ultimately, you are not choosing, there's nobody there to choose. When you think you are choosing, presence is simply emerging in that moment.

A built-in reminder is the simple understanding that whenever any kind of unhappiness arises, you know you've lost the now. That's a built-in alarm clock. The moment you realize you've lost the now, come back to the now.

Every challenge takes you a little deeper and awakens you again and again. Without the challenges, you probably would go to back to sleep. The challenges keep you awake.

If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having.

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.

When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you were waking up from a dream, the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity. No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is.

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.

The moment you put a mental label on another human being, you can no longer truly relate to that person... It then becomes possible to perpetrate any act of violence.

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

So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, I am ruined is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. I have 50 cents left in my bank account is a fact.

If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?

You are the Universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

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.

Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad.  That causes an emotional contraction.  When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you.  The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.

If you completely accept something, it changes. If you completely accept it, it shifts.

If you cannot be at ease with yourself when alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.

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.

Thinking fragments reality -- it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.

The essence of every form is the deathless. Even the essence of a blade of grass is the deathless. And that's why the world of form is sacred.

Whenever you meet anybody, it is a holy encounter. The primary event is the energy field of presence between you and the other human being that arises. You enjoy it. There is deep joy in the meeting.

In fact, the collective energy field of presence can be very helpful when people come together. It can give you an enormous boost.

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.

The little saying, 'Be still and know that I Am God' ... contains the entire wisdom of religion in those few words.

We are in the final stages of egoic madness. Almost the whole world is fighting each other. We witnessed the final stages of egoic madness in the 20th century, and even now it still is playing itself out. It has not quite come to an end yet.

I am the hole on the flute that Gods breath flows through.

A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually motivate by fear, which of course is always linked with having your focus on the future and being out of touch with the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.

The dog is still in the natural state. And you can easily see that, because you have problems and your dog doesn't. And while your happy moments may be rare, your dog celebrates life continuously.

Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. It also strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself.

We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

As you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change.

When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life.

On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.

If you are not in alignment with the moment, life is a struggle. Really, all you have to do is take responsibility for your inner alignment with now.

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.

Important thing to realize is the world is not here to make me happy. When you don't demand that the situation, or place, or person should make you happy, then actually the situation, place, or person is quite satisfying.

Whatever you do, whatever you're working with, whether it's manual work or talking to people or buying or selling, every little thing encompasses the power and simplicity of presence.

Your car breaks down in the middle of the night. It's raining. It's cold. And you have to change the tire of your car. You cannot really enjoy that it is cold and wet, but you can bring acceptance to it. Peace flows into it.

Learn from nature. See how everything gets accomplished and how the miracle of life unfolds without dissatisfaction or unhappiness.

Stressful energy arises when you think some future moment is more important than the present moment, and the doing becomes only a means to an end.

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

When you are not making the present moment into a means to an end, you also are not making every human being you meet -- in your business and even at home, in your family -- into a means to an end.

Even if they don't know it consciously, people can feel when you are making them into a means to an end only. And people are much less likely to do what you want them to do -- for example, to buy the car -- when they feel you are reducing them into a means to an end.

The whole movement of happiness, unhappiness, happiness, unhappiness, could be called unhappiness. You're suffering because your state of mind is in flux, moving back and forth. The ego's happiness is really a form of suffering, because it cannot live without unhappiness.

Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

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

Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.

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

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.

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'.

Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.

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

Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

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.

So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.

Some people when I speak of awareness of the inner body call it a technique. I would not call it a technique because it is too simple for that. When the oak tree feels its roots in the earth, its connectedness with the earth, it is not practicing a technique.

All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems.

Present-moment awareness creates a gap not only in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum. Nothing truly new and creative can come into this world except through that gap, that clear space of infinite possibility.

It is as it is. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.

Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behaviour with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake *that* for who they are.
If you are alert and present, you can point out behaviour without ego involvement (making the other person wrong).

To complain is always nonacceptance to what is.

Satisfaction through gratification will always be short-lived, therefore it will always be projected again.
You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You get there by realizing you *are* there already.

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you're taking this moment.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. Life is Now.

There *are* no problems. Only situations -- to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the 'isness' of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it -- who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.

Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. ... When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative.

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

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

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

Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disappointments before you realize that truth.

Space has no existence. To exist literally means to stand out. You cannot understand space because it doesn't stand out. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor does the unmanifested.

If it is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that determines the future, then what is it that determines the quality of your consciousness? Your degree of presence. So the only place where true change can occur and where the past can be dissolved is the Now.

When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

Give up defining yourself -- to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.

The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future -- which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.

The relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy.

Man made God in his own image.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.

Forgive yourself for not being at peace.

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

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

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.