Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher and one of the most popular spiritual author in the United States. He is best known as the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Profoundly inspirational Eckhart Tolle quotes on gratitude, success, death, universe and relationship will challenge the way you think to make your life worth living.
If you’re searching for spiritual awakening quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of inspiring Ram Dass quotes, powerful Oprah Winfrey quotes, and Deepak Chopra quotes.
Famous Eckhart Tolle Quotes
The past has no power over the present moment.
Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.
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.
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept before they will forgive.
People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.
You also realize that all the things that truly matter are beauty, love, creativity, joy, and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.
It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.
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.
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
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.
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.
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.
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.
Don’t wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.
Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain is what I want to talk about now.
To love is to recognize yourself in another.
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.
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.
You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God.
What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. ‘Who am I, then?’ The one who sees that.
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.
Discontent, blaming, complaining, self pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.
Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.
Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.
Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
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.
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.
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.
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.
No matter what you have or get, you won’t be happy. You will always be looking for something else that promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete sense of self complete and fill that sense of lack you feel within.
Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment. Surrender to what is. Say ‘yes’ to life and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you.
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality.
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.
No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
I am not saying here that helping others, caring for your children, or striving for excellence in whatever field are not worthwhile things to do but outer purpose alone is always relative, unstable, and impermanent.
You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life
I’m grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes.
How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself.
Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore.
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. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
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.
This book’s main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness that is to say, to awaken.
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness.
I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats.
Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.
Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
Your inner purpose is to awaken.
For many people who are so lost in their minds, so much involved in their thought processes, the only moments they have when they are not trapped in that is when they are relating to their animal, their pet.
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.
When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.
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.
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to ‘die before you die and find that there is no death.
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by ‘watching the thinker,’ which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
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.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice and here I am listening to it, watching it. This ‘I am’ realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
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.
In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in the mind identified state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that gives life to the physical body.
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.
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 fully attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present.
That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to dis identify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
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 non forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
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.
