Eckhart Tolle Quotes
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Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems - most life situations are - but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?
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To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
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The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.
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Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
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You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
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When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.
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When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity - what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.
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Every outer purpose is doomed to 'fail' sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things.
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I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness.
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Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word.
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'I cannot live with myself any longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. 'Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.' 'Maybe,' I thought, 'only one of them is real.'
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Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it. … Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?
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How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
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Being must be felt. It can't be thought.
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Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.
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Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
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The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
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Be there as the witnessing presence of your inner state. You don’t have to do anything. With the awareness comes transformation and freedom.
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To let go of judgment does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person.That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind.
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Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer?
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Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?
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The human condition: lost in thought.
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Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
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When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.