Eckhart Tolle Quotes

Ego is the complete identification with form. Physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

What you usually refer to when you say “I” is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of “I” in your mind and whatever the “I” has identified with.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. It is that awareness that says I AM

~ Eckhart Tolle

A new heaven is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness. And A New Earth is it's direct reflection in the physical realm.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

In normal everyday usage, I embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as an optical illusion of consciousness.

~ Eckhart Tolle

why Human should not look at the past?

~ Eckhart Tolle

The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body’s direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body’s response to thought. Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the filter of a mental interpretation, the future of thought, that is to say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike, me and mine.

~ 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 the moment.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.

~ 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

Stay present, stay conscious.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Don't look for peace. 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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies; belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them they could make themselves “right” and others “wrong” and thus define their identity through their enemies, the “others”, the “nonbelievers” or “wrong believers” who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in the killing.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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.

~ Eckhart Tolle

How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others.

~ Eckhart Tolle