137 Ethereal Eckhart Tolle Quotes on the Present Moment, Life and Consciousness
Last updated on May 3rd, 2024 at 08:14 am
Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher and writer who holds the key to unlocking inner peace and enlightenment. Drawing inspiration from timeless traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, Tolle’s teachings transcend cultural barriers, offering practical insights that resonate with everyone. His teachings guide us toward liberation from suffering and towards a deeper connection with ourselves. Let’s embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery with these insightful Eckhart Tolle quotes. You can even share these enlightening words of wisdom as inspirational sayings and captions to inspire your social following.
Being must be felt. It can’t be thought. – 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
Become conscious of being conscious. – Eckhart Tolle
The secret of life is to die before you die — and find that there is no death. – Eckhart Tolle
Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts. – Eckhart Tolle
Life wants to support you. But first you need to be open to life. – Eckhart Tolle
The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present. – Eckhart Tolle
All the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. – Eckhart Tolle
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance. – Eckhart Tolle
Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free. – Eckhart Tolle
Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
Much suffering, much unhappiness arises when you take each thought that comes into your head for the truth. – 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
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. – Eckhart Tolle
Even the most seemingly unpleasant situations – if you become aligned with it, something good will emerge from that. – Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on the Power of the Present Moment
Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment. – Eckhart Tolle
The present moment is all you will ever have. – Eckhart Tolle
You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now. – Eckhart Tolle
Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind. – Eckhart Tolle
I’m grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes. – Eckhart Tolle
I’m grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes. – Eckhart Tolle
The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears. – Eckhart Tolle
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be. – Eckhart Tolle
It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up. – Eckhart Tolle
The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. – 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
The moment that judgment 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
Become friendly with the present moment, because if you do not become friendly with the present moment you cannot become friendly with life. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them. – Eckhart Tolle
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment… The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world. – Eckhart Tolle
Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now? – Eckhart Tolle
The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. – 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
If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity. – 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
When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what’s around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without. – 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 this moment. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – 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
There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. – Eckhart Tolle
Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable. – Eckhart Tolle
Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‘I know.’ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. – Eckhart Tolle
To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually. 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. – Eckhart Tolle
So many people have this idea: I want to achieve something great or be somebody great. And they neglect the step that leads to greatness. They don’t honor this step at this moment because they have this idea of some future moment where they are going to be great. – Eckhart Tolle
Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don’t need to carry it around with you after you’ve crossed the river. – 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
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Embracing the Fullness of Life
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living. – Eckhart Tolle
Life is the dancer and you are the dance. – Eckhart Tolle
To love is to recognize yourself in another. – Eckhart Tolle
Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be. – Eckhart Tolle
If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me. – Eckhart Tolle
I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats. – Eckhart Tolle
Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role. – Eckhart Tolle
When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. – Eckhart Tolle
If there are people you haven’t forgiven, you’re not going to really awaken. You have to let go. – Eckhart Tolle
Instead of asking what do I want from life? A more powerful question is, what does life want from me. – Eckhart Tolle
Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living. – Eckhart Tolle
If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it. – Eckhart Tolle
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. – Eckhart Tolle
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level. – 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
People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future. – Eckhart Tolle
When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. – 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
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. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. – Eckhart Tolle
Thinking is a wonderful tool if it’s applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you’re dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted. – Eckhart Tolle
Jesus said, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.’ I think if he lived nowadays, instead of ‘kingdom,’ he would have said, ‘dimension.’ And ‘heaven’ refers to a sense of vastness or spaciousness. – 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. – Eckhart Tolle
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
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
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. – Eckhart Tolle
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. – Eckhart Tolle
I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process. – 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
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Mastering the Mind
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without. – Eckhart Tolle
Where there is anger there is always pain underneath. – Eckhart Tolle
Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose. – Eckhart Tolle
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them. – Eckhart Tolle
Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have. – Eckhart Tolle
When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. – Eckhart Tolle
If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small. – 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
When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed. – Eckhart Tolle
When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don’t want to be where you are. Here, Now. – Eckhart Tolle
Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out? – Eckhart Tolle
Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make. – Eckhart Tolle
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
Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not. – Eckhart Tolle
Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there. – 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
Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are. – Eckhart Tolle
Not all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become I. – 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
It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you’re waiting for the elevator – instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence. – 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
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
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. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. – Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on the Nature of Consciousness
Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness. – Eckhart Tolle
Awareness is the greatest agent for change. – Eckhart Tolle
Doing is never enough if you neglect Being. – Eckhart Tolle
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. – Eckhart Tolle
Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists. – Eckhart Tolle
Surrender comes when you no longer ask, why is this happening to me? – Eckhart Tolle
The significance is hiding in the insignificant. Appreciate everything. – Eckhart Tolle
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. – Eckhart Tolle
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts. – Eckhart Tolle
Was Jesus the son of God? Yes. But so are you. You just haven’t realized it yet. – Eckhart Tolle
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. – Eckhart Tolle
You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. – Eckhart Tolle
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on. – Eckhart Tolle
You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality. – Eckhart Tolle
Don’t Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. – Eckhart Tolle
The ‘soul’ is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are. – Eckhart Tolle
Some people get attached to their practice. They get good at it, but even becoming a good meditator can become a hindrance. – Eckhart Tolle
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction. – Eckhart Tolle
We should purify our innate well of contentment – what a wonderful expression – and then external things will be in harmony with us. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
How is always more important than what. See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. – Eckhart Tolle
The soul is your innermost being. The presence that you are beyond form. The consciousness that you are beyond form, that is the soul. That is who you are in essence. – Eckhart Tolle
I believe that Jesus realized his oneness with God and he showed, what he attempted to do was show the way to all of us, how to realize our own oneness with God also, so he’s a precursor. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – 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
You are not in the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle. – 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. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. – Eckhart Tolle
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. – Eckhart Tolle
Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. – Eckhart Tolle
Space has no existence. To exist literally means to stand out. You cannot understand space because it doesn’t stand out. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor does the Unmanifested. – Eckhart Tolle