Eckhart Tolle Quotes

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

every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.

Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet

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.

For spiritual teachers, it is important not to identify with the image people inevitably have of them.

When there is spiritual awakening, you awaken into the fullness, the aliveness, and also the sacredness of now. You were absent, asleep, and now you are present, awake.

The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be.

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.

You might say, 'What a dreadful day', without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction, your inner resistance to it, and the emotion that is created by that resistance.

Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part.

As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you.

Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure conciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form.

Whatever you do in your business comes out of a state of inner alignment with life and the source of life itself, so peace flows into whatever you do.

The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.

The word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit word Budh, meaning, to be awake. So Buddha is not a name and ultimately not a person, but a state of consciousness.

Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet - because it is the purpose of humanity.

Allow nature to teach you stillness.

If you can get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.

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

A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.

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.

If we don't change, if the egoic consciousness continues, I don't believe that humanity as a species can survive, or at least human civilization can survive, for another hundred years.

It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so - your resistance is.

How’ is always more important that ‘what.’ See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.

For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually brought about by intense suffering.

I never went out and said, "I want to do this." I never do that. I wait for things to come to me, either within or without, and I go along with it.

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.

Do not pollute your beautiful, radiant Being nor the Earth with negativity. Do not give unhappiness in any form whatsoever a dwelling place inside you.

Thought subsides when you pet your dog or you have a purring cat on your chest. Even just watching an animal can take you out of your mind. It is more deeply connected with the source of life than most humans, and that rootedness in Being transmits itself to you. Millions of people who otherwise would be completely lost in the conceptual reality of their mind are kept sane by living with an animal.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is - no matter what form it takes - you are still, you are at peace.

I drink a glass of wine or two occasionally with dinner. 'You drink alcohol?!' Well, if my state of consciousness is so fragile that a glass of wine would upset it, then it can't be worth very much.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

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

Hang on to the inner body, let it be the anchor, then you're present. If they say something challenging and you lose it again, pause, and anchor again. Practice, practice, continuous practice-becaus e when you're in touch with the inner body, spaciousness arises.

Through death you find yourself, because you no longer identify with form. You realize you are not the form with which you had identified ­ neither the physical nor the psychological form of "me". That form goes. It dissolves and who you are beyond form emerges through the opening where that form was. One could almost say that every form of life obscures God.

The ego's form of happiness can't exist without unhappiness. The ego will be happy when something good happens but unhappy when it ends.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you?

You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present.

The planet will not survive another hundred years of the same state of consciousness that produced the external effects of recent history.

Humanity as a species must change dramatically and radically or our survival is at stake.

Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.

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.

Facing facts is always empowering.

The way I feel is that there is a balance in my life between being alone and interacting with people, between Being and doing.

If increased meta-knowledge is not counter-balanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness then the likelihood of psycho-spiritual dysfunction is great.