Eckhart Tolle Quotes - Page 2

Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non-reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.

How "spiritual" you are has nothing to do with what you believe, but everything to do with your state of consciousness.

Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.

Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.

When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore.

The past has no power over the present moment.

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.

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

To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

What you react to in another you strengthen within yourself.

For awhile, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.

I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

The more you make your thoughts and beliefs into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges--the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.

Life is the dancer and you are the dance.

What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.

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

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.

If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.

Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.

Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous

Being must be 'felt' it can not be 'thought.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.

You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.

When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images.

When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

Those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world.

Consciousness is a vast ocean and thinking is the waves & ripples on the surface of the ocean. Every wave & ripple has a very short lived life - it is very fleeting Do not identify with your thoughts - continued indentification with the stream of thinking leads to a very serious dysfunction in ones sense of identity...

The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be...

In many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer.” Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore “exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.

Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment. It is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego.

I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.

Die before you die and find that there is no death.

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

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth".

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.

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

All problems are illusions of the mind.

the ego likes to emphasize the 'otherness' of others

Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise, and loving. Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.You are open to life.

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