This page includes some of my favorite quotes from Eckhart Tolle. They are organized by the book in which they are found.
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
“Incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p15
“The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.”
– Eckhart Tollem, The Power of Now, p15
“Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being ‘at one’ and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested—at one with Being.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p15
“Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate other.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p15
“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p17
We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p22
“True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to “know God”—not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p146
“True salvation is a state of freedom—from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p146
“You mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time—that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete. You see time as a means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can’t get there from where you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You “get” there by realizing that you are there already.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p146-147
“As long as you are identified with the mind, yo have an externally derived sense of self. That is to say, you get your sense of who you ar from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on. This false, mind-made self, the ego, feels vulnerable, insecure, and is always seeking new things to identify with to give it a feeling that it exists. But nothing is ever enough to give it lasting fulfillment. Its fear remains; its sense of lack and neediness remains.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p150-151
“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p24
“If in your relationship you experience both ‘love’ and the opposite of love—attack, emotional violence, and so on—then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your ‘love’ has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p151-152
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p154
“Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p154
“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p154-155
“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.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p155
“Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p177
“Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn’t.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p177-178
“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p33
“The more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering – and free of the egoic mind.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p33
“Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p14
“Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same no-thing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner stillness, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p139
“Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet – in your abdomen, you chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy?” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p112
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
“Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth.”
– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p70
“Any conceptual sense of self—seeing myself as this or that—is ego, whether predominately positive (I am the greatest) or negative (I am no good).”
– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p86
