Quotes from Eckhart Tolle

It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have?

As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pains and problems, we will never be free from them.

When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.

Jesus points to this when he says, "Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole."1 The New Testament's "Be ye perfect" is a mistranslation of the original Greek word, which means whole. This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are—with or without the pain-body.

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.

Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.

If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, you are probably creating suffering for others too. These unconscious mind patterns tend to come to an end simply by making them conscious, by becoming aware of them as they happen. You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.

Death is not an anomaly or the most dreadful of all events as modern culture would have you believe, but the most natural thing in the world, inseparable from and just as natural as its polarity — birth.

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present.

Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.

To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.

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 another form of violence.

There is no substitute for finding true purpose. But the true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.

Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself." ? Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.

In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.

And then one day, you too disappear. Your armchair is still there. But instead of you sitting in it, there is just an empty space. You went back to where you came from just a few years ago.

psychological time, which is the mind's deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.

The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction 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.

Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.

Become at ease with the state of "not knowing." This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing. So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.

El amor no desea ni teme nada.

Seek out a tree, and let it teach you stillness.