Eckhart Tolle Quotes - The Power of Now Quotes

The below are all quotations from Eckhart Tolle’s fantastic book: The Power of Now : A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.




Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.



It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept — before they will forgive.



You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure.



Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disappointments before you realize that truth.



Whatever the present moment contains, accept is as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.



Please open your eyes now, but keep attention in the inner energy field of the body as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.



When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.



Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.



Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.



The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future — which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.



Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are cause 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.



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, personal and family history, belief systems, and often political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.



If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish -- that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.



Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.



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.



Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.



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.



Consciousness is evolving throughout the universe in billions of forms. So even if we didn't make it, this wouldn't matter on cosmic scale. No gain in consciousness is ever lost, so it would simply express itself through some other form. But the very fact that I am speaking here and you are listening or reading this is a clear sign that the new consciousness is gaining a foothold on the planet.



You don't need to condemn. Just observe, That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness. Above all, don't forget to observe your own mind. Seek out the root of the insanity there.



To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.



Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.



Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.



Don't get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself.



At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.



...the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in the transcendence of the world.



Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.



I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.



The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.



All the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind.



All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.



Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind — or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.

Direct your attention inward. Have a look inside yourself. What kind of thoughts is your mind producing? What do you feel? Direct your attention into the body. Is there any tension? Once you detect that there is a low level of unease, the background static, see in what way you are avoiding, resisting, or denying life—by denying the Now.



The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.



In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being.