Eckhart Tolle Quotes

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

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.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness & all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past & not enough presence.

Vipassana is fine until it becomes a technique that has many stages and that takes time to develop. That can be okay for people for a while, but then you have to leave the technique behind.

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.

We are in the final stages of egoic madness. Almost the whole world is fighting each other.

If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.

So one could say that the only real problem is dysfunctional thinking, the rest are challenges, not problems.

A new species is arising on the planet, it is arising now and you are it.

You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still.

Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called "God." As soon as you turn away from it, God ceases to be a reality in your life, and all you are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny. Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of your life.

Where ever you are, be there totally.

Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters absolutely.. It is finding the essence of who you are.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.

The purpose of the world is for youto be lost in it, ultimately. The purpose of the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that seems to be what is needed for the awakening to happen.

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.

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

Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there'.

You have to be still for a moment to even notice that there is silence outside.

That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.

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 there isn't an emanation of love and joy, complete presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not enlightenment.

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

Very unconscious people experience their own ego through its reflection in others. When you realize that what you react to in others is also in you (and sometimes only in you), you begin to become aware of your own ego.

The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.

The future never comes. Life is always now.

◦"At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is

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.

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.

Before I wrote The Power of Now, I had a vision that I had already written the book and that it was affecting the world. I had a sense there was already a book somehow in existence. I drew a circle on a piece of paper and it said "book." Then I wrote something about the effect the book had on the world, how it influenced my life and other people's lives, and how it came to be translated into many languages affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wonderous dream arises.

If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you're back in time.

If you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.

The world is in such a mess because of the continuous conflict that arises between human beings - not only between individuals but between tribes and nations and this group and that group and so on. But change can come in only when people start with themselves.

Everything is honoured, but nothing matters.

The power of now can only be realized now. It requires no time and effort. Effort means you're trying hard to get somewhere, and so you are not present, welcoming this moment as it is.

Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.

Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.

Be alert and present and see that your identity is not from your past story; who you truly are is the alert presence that is inseparable from the present moment. You are this, which has no name and no form.

True Power is within, and it is available now.

A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach in the conventional sense of the word, does not have anything to give or add to you, such as new information, beliefs, or rules of conduct. The only function of such a teacher is to help you remove that which separates you from the truth of who you already are and what you already know in the depth of your being

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.

I've received more and more emails from teachers saying that they are beginning to teach presence in their classroom without necessarily calling it that or calling it anything, not as part of the official curriculum. It's like an underground movement not yet officially recognized by the educational authorities - at least not as far as I know!

... inherited collective mind-patterns ... have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.

In fact every belief is an obstacle. It does not even require your realization, since you are already who you are. But without realization, who you are does not shine forth into this world. It remains in the unmanifested which is, of course, your true home. You are then like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential

Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.