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Eckhart Tolle

131 quotes

“Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being must be felt. It can't be thought.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listen to people's stories and they all could be entitled "Why I Cannot Be At Peace Now" The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Presence is a state of inner spaciousness.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human condition: lost in thought.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.....”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.”
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“Try to catch the voice in your head, in the very moment it complains about something. Recognise it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a thought.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens to them for their happiness. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing that goodness to emerge. If peace is really what you want, then choose peace. The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. “I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.” Introduction”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. p. 16”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking. When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of "no-mind." At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You think that your attention is in the present moment when it's actually taken up completely by time. You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now. What you refer to as your "life" should more accurately be called your "life situation." It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness. p. 43”
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“If you come to a spiritual teacher — or this book — looking for stimulating ideas, theories, beliefs, intellectual discussions, then you will be disappointed. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover and then put away. Live with it, pick it up frequently, and more importantly, put it down frequently, or spend more time holding it than reading it. Many readers will feel naturally inclined to stop reading after each entry, to pause, reflect, become still. It is always more helpful and more important to stop reading than to continue reading. Allow the book to do its work, to awaken you from the old grooves of your repetitive and conditioned thinking. (intro)”
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“The form of this book can be seen as a revival for the present age of the oldest form of recorded spiritual teachings: the sutras of ancient India. Sutras are powerful pointers to the truth in the form of aphorisms or short sayings, with little conceptual elaboration. The Vedas and Upanishads are the early sacred teachings recorded in the form of sutras, as are the words of the Buddha. The sayings and parables of Jesus, too, when taken out of their narrative context, could be regarded as sutras, as well as the profound teachings contained in the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom. The advantage of the sutra form lies in its brevity... (intro)”
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“Many things in your life matter but only one thing matters absolutely. It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matters whether you are rich or poor. It certainly makes a difference in your life. Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking. But they don't matter absolutely. There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who your are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life but by realizing who you are at the deepest level. (Ch 5)”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody knows the exact figure because records were not kept, but it seems certain that during a three hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the “Holy Inquisition,“ an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This sure ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake. The sacred feminine was declared demonic, and an entire dimension largely disappeared from human experience. Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property. Males who denied the feminine even within themselves were now running the world, a world that was totally out of balance. The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity... The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other lifeforms, and is more attuned to the natural world... If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego's growth would have been greatly curtailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For this companion volume to A New Earth, I selected passages from the original book that felt particularly suitable for inspirational or meditative reading. For this reason I do not recommend that you read this book straight through from cover to cover. It would be far more beneficial to read, at the most, one chapter at a time, stopping at and perhaps rereading whatever passages elicit an inner response. Then let the words sink in and sense the truth to which they point, which is, of course, already within you. It can also be helpful to open the book at random occasionally, read one page or just one passage and let the words point the way to that dimension deep within that is beyond words, beyond thought. The truth to which the words point, the timeless dimension of consciousness, cannot be arrived at through discursive thought and conceptual understanding.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Equating the physical body with "I," the body that is destined to grow old, wither, and die, always leads to suffering. To refrain from identifying with the body doesn't mean that you no longer care for it. If it is strong, beautiful, or vigorous, you can appreciate those attributes—while they last. You can also improve the body's condition through nutrition and exercise. If you don't equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, or the body becomes incapacitated, this will not affect your sense of worth or identity in any way. In fact, as the body begins to weaken, the light of consciousness can shine more easily.”
Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source