This page lists some of the all-time best Eckhart Tolle quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Self & Suffering Quotes
- Presence & Essence Quotes
- Awareness & Observation Quotes
- Shift & Awakening Quotes
- Personal Awakening Quotes
50+ Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Self, Presence, Awakening, & More
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Self & Suffering
“When we spiritually use the word ‘ego’, it means complete identification with the stream of thinking and complete absence of awareness.” — Eckhart Tolle
“For most people who are identified with thinking all the time, every thought is invested with a sense of self and ‘me’. Every thought grips you completely, and you’re in it—this is what ‘identified’ means. Every thought that arises becomes a ‘me’, and you think it and you’re in it. Most people are dragged along all day long by this mindstream—one thought after another. And, within that mindstream, there is a mind-made sense of self, a ‘me’, consisting of past memories, and experiences, and things that my mind has identified with and that contribute to my identity. They’re all thought forms.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Continuous identification with the stream of thinking leads to a very serious dysfunction in one’s sense of identity because then your sense of who you are, your sense of I-ness or self, is derived from whatever your mind is telling you about yourself … In other words, your sense of who you are is derived from thought.” — Eckhart Tolle
“There’s the mindstream, there’s identification with the mindstream, and there’s the possibility of stepping out of the mindstream by accessing the present moment.” — Eckhart Tolle
“You’re so identified with it that you don’t even know that you have a running commentary on your life—you become the running commentary.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Most of the self-talk, the voice in the head, is conditioned by one’s past, education, upbringing, the culture you’ve been brought up in, your parents, and so on.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If you allow the thoughts to be, they lose their energy because you’re no longer feeding them energy through your identification.” — Eckhart Tolle
“It’s a deep-seated habit being totally identified with thinking.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If you don’t realize the essence of who you are, you spend your whole life in a false sense of self.” — Eckhart Tolle
“In all the ancient teachings, expressed in different words, there is a deeper sense of self possible to humans that is not thought.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Suffering is most people’s only spiritual teacher.” — Eckhart Tolle
“You need suffering for you to come to a point of realization that you do not need to suffer anymore.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Your thoughts make you suffer more than anything else. It’s not usually the situation, it’s your interpretation of the situation.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Suffering implies a story—a little ‘me’ that is unhappy.” — Eckhart Tolle
“At some level, you recognize that most of your suffering is self-created. It is created out of resistance to what is. It is created out of an interpretation of something that is—it comes from a thought, from an interpretation, not from the situation.” — Eckhart Tolle
“There is another way to live in which I no longer mentally argue with what is, and that’s the end of self-inflicted suffering. And, if I no longer inflict suffering on myself, I no longer inflict suffering on others because the two go together.” — Eckhart Tolle
“What I’m trying to convey and teach is that it is possible to live free of suffering.” — Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Presence & Essence
“What is my life? It’s a mental construct that you call ‘my life’, and you miss the actual life in the present moment.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Some people habitually live actively disliking the is-ness of the present moment, and that’s their normal state of consciousness.” — Eckhart Tolle
“For most people in the normal state of consciousness—and normal means somewhat or very insane—the present moment is usually overlooked habitually and unconsciously. People have been conditioned to overlook the most important thing there ever is.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If you take consciousness away from thinking, what happens is you become very present in the here and now … Here and now, the present moment, is really the key to inner transformation. Whenever the mind becomes still, what happens simultaneously is you become present—and that in itself is a transformation of consciousness.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If you’re looking to the future to find yourself, you’re missing yourself already—the essence of your being which you can only find in the now.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Except for a thought of future, there is no future because nobody has ever experienced the future.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Waiting basically means you want the next moment but not this one—this is why you’re waiting. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be waiting, you would just be there.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Your life has never been not now and will never be not now.” — Eckhart Tolle
“We need to realize fully that all we ever have in life is this moment because there is nothing else … This moment is your life.” — Eckhart Tolle
“To be at one with life is to be at one with the present moment.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If you make friends with the present moment and always say ‘yes’ to whatever is, life becomes friendly towards you.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The essence is to make the present moment into your friend, not your enemy. Always ask yourself, what is my inner relationship with the present moment?” — Eckhart Tolle
“The spiritual teaching attempts to show people that they have within themselves already what they are looking for on the outside—the aliveness, the peace, the sense of deep enough fulfillment is already present in every human being as their innermost essence. So, it’s not a question of needing to obtain or acquire something new.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Can you sense the very presence that is the essence of who you are?” — Eckhart Tolle
“Beyond the personality, beyond your personal history, there is a deeper essence of who you are.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Out of that presence comes a different sense of identity—a very deep sense of well-being.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The loss of now is also the loss of being, and the loss of your essential identity because it can only be found in the now.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Surrender means only accept this moment as it is … I live in surrender to the present moment … Recognize that it is futile to argue with whatever is happening at this moment.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If there is the inner state of ‘yes to what is’, that is the state of inner peace … See how your world changes as you no longer resist the is-ness of this moment … Whatever human beings create externally is a reflection of the inner state … The outer is always a reflection of the inner. So, if the inner is predominantly a state of inner peace, we create a peaceful world on the outside.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Death is not the opposite of life but only the opposite of birth. Life is beyond the forms of life. Life is timeless, indestructible, and immortal—it’s that which underlies the entire manifested world.” — Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Awareness & Observation
“As you sit here, is it possible for you to simply watch what’s happening around you without adding any interpretation to it—to just be present with what is?” — Eckhart Tolle
“The awareness of thought is not a thought.” — Eckhart Tolle
“We’re using thought to point to something that’s beyond thought.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The amazing thing is to know yourself as spacious awareness—that frees you from believing that your personal history is who you are.” — Eckhart Tolle
“There are two dimensions of consciousness possible within you: one is the dimension of thinking, but a more vital and deeper dimension is that of simple awareness.” — Eckhart Tolle
“You can only be aware of consciousness as yourself, as the eternal subject. Your consciousness can never become something that becomes an object in consciousness. Everything else is an object in consciousness, but you cannot be aware of consciousness as an object because consciousness is you.” — Eckhart Tolle
“You can never say, ‘Oh, there it is’ because you are it. It can never become an object in your consciousness because it is consciousness itself.” — Eckhart Tolle
“In the same way that you observe the outer world, you can also observe the inner world.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The essential process starts with dis-identifying from the thinking mind … The first step is to stand back inside yourself—take one step back and observe what the mind does. So, you become the observer of your mind.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Your sense of identity shifts from being the thought to being the observer of your thoughts—sometimes called the witness. You are witnessing all the thoughts that go through your mind. That’s a very essential shift in identity.” — Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Shift & Awakening
“What does it feel like to be you now—without taking recourse to memory, not remembering your story? There’s no conceptual answer.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The question of identity is the most important question in your life: who am I?” — Eckhart Tolle
“This is the secret of life, and it’s so simple: know who you are beyond the surface self.” — Eckhart Tolle
“There’s nothing that you need to add in order to find yourself and be yourself … You recognize yourself as the consciousness that was looking for yourself.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Meditation is not necessary for everybody. Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore. And, then something inside them snaps suddenly and there is a disidentification from thinking.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Spiritual awakening is when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were—the personal sense of self … The awakening of something within you that is deeper than thought is really the main thing.” — Eckhart Tolle
“It’s a realization that the suffering ‘me’ is ultimately a fiction of the mind … I realized then that the suffering self wasn’t ultimately real.” — Eckhart Tolle
“You are no longer reinforcing the emotional state through your identification, so that’s the beginning of inner transformation—that separation from the passing mental or emotional state … The inner transformation is not really about finding lots of answers to your questions but finding a new relationship to thought.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Enlightenment points to a radical psychological transformation … We need to realize that urgent need in the human psyche—the personal psyche and the collective psyche—for a radical psychological transformation.” — Eckhart Tolle
“There is a deeper dimension in you where whatever happened to the person, good or bad, is transcended … There is a dimension in you that is deeper than what you normally identify with as ‘yourself’—that is deeper than the ‘me’, the personal history that most people believe is who they are … Of course you can remember your personal history, but you are no longer trapped in that exclusively personalized sense of ‘me.’” — Eckhart Tolle
“It is extraordinarily important to discover that there is such a thing in you as a space between one thought and another—so there’s no longer an uninterrupted stream of thinking … Consciously, occasionally, create little gaps in the stream of mind … In that gap, there’s the dimension of inner stillness, and that’s a wonderfully liberating thing … It’s kind of finding a deeper ‘you’, a deeper sense of self, than the mind.” — Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle Quotes on his Personal Awakening
“I had been identified throughout my life with an unhappy, mind-made entity consisting of self-images and self-talk in the mind.” — Eckhart Tolle
“If one spends one’s whole life in one particular cultural environment, one tends to become conditioned by that particular culture without knowing it. So, by experiencing different cultures as a child, that somehow perhaps made the cultural conditioning less deep, less rigid.” — Eckhart Tolle
“I had been doing quite well on an external level—everybody considered that my life was successful—but inside I was suffering from very deep depressions and continuous states of anxiety for years. I was actually miserably unhappy while everybody else around me thought that I was a very successful person.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Who I am has come about through transcending my personal history.” — Eckhart Tolle
“‘I can’t live with myself any longer.’ That sentence became a trigger for a transformation. Who is the ‘I’ and who is ‘the self’ that I cannot live with? There was a kind of separation that occurred at that moment. I separated myself—my sense of identity separated from the unhappy, depressed, and anxious person and suddenly there was me here observing that unhappy self. So, there was a disidentification, and I thought how is that possible I can now observe the unhappiness as if it were in me but not essentially me.” — Eckhart Tolle
“It was in my 29th year that I woke up in the middle of the night. This was not uncommon for me waking up in the middle of the night and feeling intensely depressed and in a state of great fear at the same time. That happened again that night and the thought occurred to me, ‘I can’t live with myself any longer’. And, that thought repeated itself in my mind, ‘I just i can’t live with myself’. And, then suddenly, I looked at the thought. I kind of stood back from that thought and looked at it and said, ‘That’s a strange thought, ‘I’ cannot live with ‘myself’. Am I one or am I two?’ This thought seems to show that there’s two people here: ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that I cannot live with … Who am ‘I’, and who is ‘myself’ that I cannot live with? That question triggered an inner shift … Something inside me must have disidentified from the self … A kind of an inner disidentification happened: the ‘I am’ (consciousness) separated itself from the conditioned entity (my sense of identity, the self, that consisted largely of an unhappy story).” — Eckhart Tolle
“An inner separation happened between the unhappy self and a deeper sense of ‘I’ or beingness—which I now call consciousness itself.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Gradually, I began to understand that what happened to me was ‘awakening.’” — Eckhart Tolle
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