Eckhart Tolle Quotes

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.

By watching the mechanics of the mind, you step out of its resistance patterns, and you can then allow the present moment to be.

As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve.

The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.

Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

Although an increasing number of humans are undergoing a process of awakening, identification with thinking is still the prevalent state of consciousness. Thinking is potentially a powerful tool, but it has taken us over, and a lot of it is dysfunctional and negative.

When you complain, you make yourself a victim. When you speak out, you are in power.

I was deeply identified with a very unhappy, egoic entity I believed was "me." For years I lived in depression and continuous anxiety. One night I couldn't stand it anymore. The thought came into my mind, "I cannot live with myself any longer."

Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.

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

The tools of science and technology amplified the effects of the madness of the egoic mind. So the survival of the planet began to be threatened, and with it the survival of humanity.

Humanity had to go through egoic madness and then outgrow it.

Because we all carry the Truth within us as our essence, we recognize it immediately.

The word 'heart' can refer to an emotional bond between people, and also to the precious faculty of empathy, an 'open heart', which means sharing the feelings of another and includes an outflow of goodwill towards our fellow humans and all life forms. This, of course, is what the Dalai Lama refers to when he says "my religion is kindness", and is closely related to the ability to feel compassion.

Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.

True salvation is freedom from negativity.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it.

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.

The egoic madness, or dysfunction, becomes enormously amplified by the science and technology we all have developed.

Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.

Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

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.

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.

That is the challenge of a spiritual teacher: not to take on board the projections of specialness people have. This is especially dangerous for spiritual teachers who only have contact with disciples or followers, who may live in an ashram.

People always form images of who others are, and they can be inflated images.

For many years I had been deeply identified with thinking and the painful, heavy emotions that had accumulated inside. My thought activity was mostly negative, and my sense of identity was also mostly negative, although I tried hard to prove to myself and to the world that I was good enough by working very hard academically. But even after I had achieved academic success, I was happy for two weeks or three and then the depression and anxiety came back.

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

Ultimately what you do is secondary. But how you do it is primary.

You create a good future by creating a good present. How do you do that? By recognizing the goodness that is already inherent in the present moment, even in the midst of challenges. Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

The future is only a thought form. Work with the present moment. Be with what is.

Acceptance is the embracing of what happens. Acceptance is a way of getting in touch with the deeper, timeless dimension of aware presence, simply through accepting that this is what is happening or this is what I am feeling or thinking.

Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it.

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

Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness. There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance of being awake, of not falling back to sleep.

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

The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.

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

It is very hard to tell when I started to be a spiritual teacher. There was a time when occasionally somebody would come and ask me questions. One could say at that point I became a spiritual teacher, although the term did not occur to me then.

Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep on asserting that it's okay to be sick?

Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.

The fires of suffering become the light of consciousness.

When the pain that the little me creates for itself becomes intense enough, the ego will self-destruct. It has a self-destruct mechanism built in, fortunately, so eventually every ego dies.

If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish - that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Transformational entertainment is a story that both entertains and uplifts you, not simply because you are inspired, but because it reveals the mechanics that allow people to have more effective, loving lives, lives of more connection, community, and communion.