Eckhart Tolle was born on the 16th of February, 1948 in Lünen, Germany. He is a spiritual teacher and best known as the author of “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” which sold an estimated three million and five million copies respectively in North America by 2009.
Tolle was depressed for much of his life until age 29 when he experienced an “inner transformation”. He then spent several years wandering “in a state of deep bliss” before becoming a spiritual teacher. Eckhart Tolle does not identify with any specific religion, but he has been influenced by the teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.
In this article, we have compiled an array of popular Eckhart Tolle quotes & sayings.
80 Eckhart Tolle Quotes About Life, Success & Happiness
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“To recognize one’s own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don’t realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even than any movie.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“All problems are illusions of the mind.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“…the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The past has no power over the present moment.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“To love is to recognize yourself in another.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Don’t Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“This is my secret,” he said. “I don’t mind what happens.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon.
It is also insane.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
It is also insane.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The significance is hiding in the insignificant. Appreciate everything.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. … The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“You have so much to learn from your enemies.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Man made God in his own image…” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
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.”― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote
“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 a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.” ― Eckhart Tolle Quote