Eckhart Tolle Quotes

In fact, people think you have to be stressed to be successful. They think if you are not stressed, something is wrong with you.

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.

When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness.

The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing.

At the height of creative activity fueled by enthusiasm, there will be enormous intensity and energy behind what you do. You will feel like an arrow that is moving toward the target-and enjoying the journey.

Whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware in that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly. The moment this happens your identity has shifted from ego to awareness. This means the ego is shrinking and awareness is growing.

When you observe yourself reacting to what are minor things in your life, you will find that the mechanism is the same as when major things seem to go wrong in your life and there is upset.

Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.

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.

And whenever you feel that essence in another, you also feel it in yourself.

A group needs enemies, because without enemies its identity cannot continue to be defined.

For the ego to survive, it must make time - past and future - more important than the present moment.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

The human condition: lost in thought.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.

Many people don't realise until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.

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

When you are in the present moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love.

Enthusiasm is the power that transfers the mental blueprint into the physical dimension.

Most people's lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less. These two movements obscure the fact that Being cannot be given or taken away. Being in its fullness is already within you, Now.

The most important healing - realizing who you are. The healing on the outer level is fine, but it's not the essence of healing.

The future does not exist, because nobody has ever experienced it. You can only ever experience a present moment.

It's a wonderful thing to perceive the world and to interact with it and with other people and nature from that deep place of utter stillness, where the compulsion to immediately label and interpret whatever arises around you is no longer there.

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth.

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

I have spoken to many people who have begun to live in presence, and they find many changes come into their lives. Sometimes these changes happen as inner realizations - "This is what I have to do" - or they arise from the external when something suddenly happens.

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

The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

For some people, it's the beginning of an awakening when they hear or read, "You have a voice in your head that never stops talking. Have you noticed that?" And suddenly they become aware that the thoughts go through their heads, whereas before they were so identified with them that they were those thoughts.

Teaching a practice can also be a hindrance if it becomes one's identity. To be a spiritual teacher is a temporary function. I'm a spiritual teacher when somebody comes to me and some teaching happens, but the moment they leave I'm no longer a spiritual teacher. If I carry the identity of spiritual teacher, it will cause suffering.

Being aware of your breath forces you into the present moment - the key to all inner transformation. Whenever you are conscious of the breath, you are absolutely present. You may also notice that you cannot think and be aware of your breathing. Conscious breathing stops your mind.

To do everything in a sacred manner means to do everything fully in the state of presence.

True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.

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

Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.

After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future. That's an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis-when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless.

To be conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey.

Even running to catch a train or a taxi, you can enjoy the high energy of the moment.

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

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Movies really have replaced what traditionally were mythologies, that every culture had their mythological beliefs and their collective 'stories.' There is now the possibility for movies to embody that arising new state of consciousness.

Look around the room a few times a day as if you had just been born into that room.

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".

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

When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?

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