"When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in." (Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now", 1997)
"A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness." (Eckhart Tolle)
"All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace ~ arise from beyond the mind." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Always say 'yes' to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say 'yes' to life - and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Am I aware not only of what is happening at this moment, but also of the Now itself as the living timeless inner space in which everything happens?" (Eckhart Tolle)
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you." (Eckhart Tolle)
"As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear." (Eckhart Tolle)
"As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love – even the most simple action." (Eckhart Tolle)
"As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, this sense of your own presence, you realize the state of pure consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body and the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously thought of as 'your self'." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it's free." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness." (Eckhart Tolle)
"By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you." (Eckhart Tolle)
"By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important any more. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form." (Eckhart Tolle)
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Don’t Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness." (Eckhart Tolle)
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"For what you do to others, you do to yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind~stuff. Your life is real." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … 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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything." (Eckhart Tolle)
"I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment." (Eckhart Tolle)
"I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten. Living knowledge, ancient and yet ever new, is then activated and released from within you." (Eckhart Tolle)
"I just cannot live with myself any longer. [...] If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self ’ that ‘I’ cannot live with." (Eckhart Tolle , "The Power of Now")
"Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate 'other'. You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is." (Eckhart Tolle)
"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. (Eckhart Tolle)
"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without." (Eckhart Tolle)
"If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego." (Eckhart Tolle)
"In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same." (Eckhart Tolle)
"In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not." (Eckhart Tolle)
"It has been said 'God is love' but that is not absolutely correct. God is the One Life in and beyond the countless forms of life. Love implies duality: lover and beloved, subject and object. so love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Money can activate the painbody and cause complete unconsciousness." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?" (Eckhart Tolle)
"Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain." (Eckhart Tolle)
"On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane." (Eckhart Tolle)
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.True power if within, and it is available to you now." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Spiritual Awakening is awakening from the dream of thought." (Eckhart Tolle)
"The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not 'the thinker'. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken." (Eckhart Tolle)
"The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it." (Eckhart Tolle)
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." (Eckhart Tolle)
"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over." (Eckhart Tolle)
"The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind." (Eckhart Tolle)
"[...] the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions." (Eckhart Tolle)
"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it." (Eckhart Tolle)
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is." (Eckhart Tolle)
"To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness." (Eckhart Tolle)
"To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought." (Eckhart Tolle)
"To be aware of little, quiet things, you need to be quiet inside. A high degree of alertness is required. Be still. Look. Listen. Be present." (Eckhart Tolle)
"To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions." (Eckhart Tolle)
"To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now." (Eckhart Tolle)
"To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease." (Eckhart Tolle)
"True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found." (Eckhart Tolle)
"What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it’s the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has ‘I,’ ‘me,’ or ‘mine’ in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whatever the present moment contains, accept is as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." (Eckhart Tolle)
"When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are." (Eckhart Tolle)"
"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." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. [...] When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Where does all that unhappiness come from?" (Eckhart Tolle)
"Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Within every situation is contained a seed of grace. Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world." (Eckhart Tolle)
"Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose." (Eckhart Tolle)
"You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold." (Eckhart Tolle)
"You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while." (Eckhart Tolle)
"You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now." (Eckhart Tolle)
"You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present." (Eckhart Tolle)
"You don’t need to condemn. Just observe, That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness. Above all, don’t forget to observe your own mind. Seek out the root of the insanity there." (Eckhart Tolle)
"You get there by realizing you are already there." (Eckhart Tolle)
