Eckhart Tolle Quotes

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.

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. But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person's attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.

Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.

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.

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

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords." (p. 28)

The more you are focused on time-past and future-the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

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

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

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought

Music creates a bridge for people to move out of thinking and into presence.

Humanity is reaching the end of the evolutionary stage of ego. The closer we get to the end, the more dysfunctional humanity becomes.

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.

If you are trying to get from here to there, and you already are late, you know that you are late, and yet you are aligned with the present moment while you are stuck in a traffic jam. You are totally accepting of the moment.

Most humans live in the mindset that this moment is only important because it's getting them to the next one.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

So give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting . . . snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything. So next time somebody says, “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” you can reply, “That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing

When I'm with people, I'm a spiritual teacher. That's the function, but it's not my identity. The moment I'm alone, my deepest joy is to benobody, to relinquish the function of a teacher. It's a temporary function.

When great loss happens - deaths close to you or your own approaching death - this is an opportunity for stepping completely out of identification with form and realizing the essence of who you are, or that the essence of anyone who is suffering or dying is beyond death.

You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure.

I believe from what I can see there is a good chance the shift will happen in humanity before it is too late.

Whenever you interact with people,don't be there primarily as a function or a role,But as a Field of conscious Presence

When you feel confused or burdened by problems focus on THIS INSTANT and ask yourself: WHAT PROBLEM DO I HAVE RIGHT NOW? You will find that there is no problem NOW. A challenge that requires action, possibly, but not a problem.

The basis for true change is freedom from negativity. And that's what acceptance implies: no negativity about what is. And then you see what this moment requires: what is it that is required now so that life can express itself more fully?

I sometimes get a distorted view of how quickly humans are evolving, because I meet many people who are evolving beyond ego. Then I have to switch on the TV to realize, "Oh, no, it is not happening to everybody yet." But it is happening.

Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.

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

Some people are stuck in tedious things, like their jobs, and they are bored. Other people experience one stressful thing after another.

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse... By misuse, I mean that people who have never glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statmeent "God is dead.

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

Bring awareness to the many subtle sounds of nature - The rustling of leaves in the wind, Raindrops falling, The humming of an insect, The first birdsong at dawn.

The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself.

On the new Earth, as the awakened consciousness comes in, I would say the ego would develop in children and quickly become outgrown when they reach adulthood.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is the honoring of small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.

The significance is hiding in the insignificant. Appreciate everything.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

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.

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 you continuously know and sense yourself as the space of consciousness rather than what appears in consciousness - sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions - then it can be said that you are enlightened... except that you wouldn't think or speak of yourself as 'enlightened', because that would instantly create another mind-based conceptual identity and so it would be the end of 'your' enlightenment.

The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

Feel the Aliveness within your Body. That anchors You in the Now.

Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.

The moment you become aware of the silence, you also have become silent.