Eckhart tolle quotes

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

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.

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.

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

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

To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer the universe.

If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.

The power is in you. The answer is in you. And you are the answer to all your searches: you are the goal. You are the answer. It's never outside.

Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret.

In the unawakened state you don't use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of years. You don't see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns.

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.

To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds. Listening to the silence immediately creates stillness inside you.

Get the inside right, and the outside will take care of itself.

There have been many people for whom limitations, failure, loss, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility and compassion. It made them more real.

The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.

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.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in its depth?

When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation or accept it, all else is madness.

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

No matter how long your journey appears to be, there is never more than this: one step, one breath, one moment... Now.

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.

Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

Resistance keeps you stuck. Surrender immediately opens you to the greater intelligence that is vaster than the human mind, and it can then express itself through you. So through surrender often you find circumstances changing.

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.

Observe your thoughts, don't believe them.

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

If you don't have a good relationship with the now, you don't have a good relationship with life.

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.

The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.

Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.

Worry means the mind is controlling you. Worry is always pointless. A solution never comes out of worry.

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.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action-just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.

Thought alone cannot recognize spiritual truths no matter how highly developed thought is. It's impossible.

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

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

You are awareness, disguised as a person.

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?

Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.

When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will.

When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life.

The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.

Nothing that is of real value can be lost, only the false dissolves.

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.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.

Stop looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love - you have a treasure within that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.

When you drop your expectations that a person, a situation, a place, or an object should fulfill you, it's easier to be present in this moment because you're no longer looking to the next one. Most people want to get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this moment.

It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.

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

Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.

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.

Consciousness is a vast ocean and thinking is the waves & ripples on the surface of the ocean.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.

Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there, or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.

The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body - to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life. The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes.

Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

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

You are here to enable the divine purpose of the Universe to unfold. That is how important you are!

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.

Important thing to realize is the world is not here to make me happy. When you don't demand that the situation, or place, or person should make you happy, then actually the situation, place, or person is quite satisfying.

All you need to know and observe in yourself is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately... you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.

If your relationship to the present moment is not right - nothing can ever be right in the future - because when the future comes - it's the present moment.

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.

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.

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.

Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit.

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.

Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.

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.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Always work with the present moment, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.

The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

Being rich/wealthy is being in touch with the fullness of life. When you are open to the present moment, what comes in, is a gratitude for "what is". When you are aligned with the present moment, there is a peace that comes, so it is like you are experiencing life for the first time, when you become present. When you are in a state of gratitude for what is ... that is really what being wealthy means

You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes.

You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.

The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions.

The secret of awakening is to unconditionally accept this moment as it is.

Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly.

When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.

Gratefulness for what is there is one of the most powerful tools for creating what is not yet there. What does gratefulness mean? It means you appreciate what is. You value, you give attention to, you honor whatever is here at this moment.

Whatever you accept completely, you go beyond. If you fight it, you're stuck with it.

I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.

Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind.

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.

Much suffering, much unhappiness arises when you take each thought that comes into your head for the truth.

I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.

As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pain and our problems, we will never be free from them.

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.

You are this universe experiencing itself, very briefly, as a human.

You can not have an argument with a fully conscious person.

Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures.

Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man's-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.

You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that 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.

As you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change.

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

Stress is wanting something to be the way it isn't.

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

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

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

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.

Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.

What I know for sure is that I am a temporary expression in physical form of the one consciousness that expresses itself throughout the universe. I am not separate from that.

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

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

Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value. You then continue to meet people, to be involved in experience and activities, but without the wants and fears of the egoic self. That is to say, you no longer demand that a situation, person, place, or event should satisfy you or make you happy. It's passing and imperfect nature is allowed to be.

You are the Universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

Ultimately what you do is secondary. But how you do it is primary.

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

In today's rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.

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

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 primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment. This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering. Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no. If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.