Eckhart Tolle is one of the 20th century’s greatest spiritualists. In a comprehensive list of 81 quotes, his enlightened viewpoint is demonstrated as expressed in the phrase: “Non-resistance, non-judgment, and non-attachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.” As you read each one, absorb its full meaning. Every quote is an opportunity for you to be guided by and follow its pure essence in living life fully. These quotes are broken up into two parts for you to digest more easily.
1. “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.
“Whenever you interact with people don’t be there primarily as a function or role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only LOSE something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
2. “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.”
3. “To love is to recognize yourself in another.”
4. “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.”
5. “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.”
6. “Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.”
7. “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.”
8. “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.”
9. “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.”
10. “Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”
11. “You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”
12. “Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.”
13. “Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.”
14. “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.”
15. “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.”
16. “Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.”
17. “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”
18. “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”
19. “Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.”
20. “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”
21. “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.”
22. “Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.”
23. “All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.”
24. “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.”
25. “Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.”
26. “Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the ‘love’ of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.”
27. “Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … 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.”
28. “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.”
29. “To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, THE GENERAL conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone, there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.”
30. “Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.”
31. “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”
32. “The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.”
33. “If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.”
34. “…The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.”
35. “Man made God in his own image…”
36. “Don’t Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.”
37. “Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?”
38. “Become conscious of being conscious.”
39. “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.”
40. “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.”
By Eckhart Tolle
Re-Posted: Miracles Directory, Healthy Living Resources