Eckhart Tolle is a German writer, especially known for his work The power of Now, in which he talks about his experiences and learnings about the importance of living in the present and having full attention in our daily life.
Tolle's story is interesting, as for much of his life he suffered from depression, and when he was approaching 30 years of age he underwent an internal transformation, which is called "enlightenment." In his sentences you can receive his most important teachings.
-All problems are illusions of the mind.
-Practice presence, embrace the place where life happens.
-Mindfulness means full acceptance.
-The main cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it.
-Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
-Consciousness is the greatest agent of change.
-There is nothing the ego likes less than hearing about itself.
-Egos are attracted to bigger egos.
-The past has no power over the present moment.
-Worry appears necessary, but serves no useful purpose.
-The only vital step on your path to enlightenment is this: learn to stop identifying with your mind..
-The good thing is that you can free yourself from your mind. That's the only true liberation.
-Your love is not on the outside; it is deep within you. You can't lose it and it can't leave you.
-Happiness and unhappiness are one. Only the illusion of time separates them.
-A thought is in your mind, an emotion has a strong physical component.
-The beginning of freedom is the understanding that you are not the entity that owns you, the one who thinks. Knowing this allows you to observe this entity.
-The one who teaches and the one taught create the teaching together.
-Non-reaction is not weakness, but strength.
-Life puts on the way the experiences we need most for the evolution of our consciousness.
-Both abundance and scarcity are internal states that manifest as your reality.
-You can't be in the present and be unhappy at the same time.
-Be aware of being aware.
-It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens.
-Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that's why it is called present.
-Love does not want or fear anything.
-Like a butterfly fluttering from one flower to another, the mind clings to past experiences.
-You cannot receive what you do not give. Outflow determines inflow.
-The moment you realize that you are not present, you are present.
-On a deep level you are already complete. When you realize it, there is a joyous energy behind everything you do..
-I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats..
-Love, joy and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from the dominion of the mind..
-Living with respect to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is an inauthentic life.
-Pleasure is always derived from something outside of you, while joy arises from within.
-The significant is hidden in the insignificant. Appreciate everything.
-It is not uncommon for people to spend their entire lives waiting to start living.
-Life is an adventure, not an organized trip.
-The foundation of greatness is honoring the little things of the present moment, rather than pursuing the idea of greatness..
-Do not seek happiness. If you look for it, you will not find it, because looking for it is the antithesis of happiness.
-When your consciousness is directed outward, the mind and the world arise. When it goes inwards, it reaches its own source and returns home, to the unmanifest.
-Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
-The power to create a better future is in the present moment: you create a good future by creating a good present.
-Life is not as serious as the mind makes it seem.
-Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
-Recognizing the good that is already in your life is the foundation of all abundance.
-When a thought loses force, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream, a gap of no-mind..
-Relationships themselves are not the cause of pain and unhappiness, they bring to the surface the pain and unhappiness that are already in you..
-What a caterpillar calls the end of the world, we call a butterfly.
-Only by abandoning resistance, by making yourself vulnerable, can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
-You do not find peace by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level..
-The secret of life is to die before dying and discover that there is no death.
-Beneath anger there is always pain.
-Recognizing madness is the beginning of healing and transcendence.
-To love is to recognize yourself in another.
-You have a lot to learn from your enemies.
-You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
-Instead of being your thoughts and emotions, be the consciousness behind them.
-Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and it does with your state of consciousness.
-Whatever you fight makes you strong, and what you resist persists.
-You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future.
-Non-resistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.
-Much of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created while the unobserved mind directs life.
-If little things have the power to annoy you, then who you think you are is exactly that: little.
-Don't worry about the fruit of your actions: keep an eye on the action itself. The fruit will come when it corresponds.
-Feel the life inside your body. That anchors you in the Now.
-Make it a habit to ask yourself: What's going on inside of me right now??
-If you cannot feel comfortable when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to remedy your concern.
-If the imaginary future is better, it gives you hope or pleasant expectations. If it's worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.
-Don't let a crazy world tell you that success is anything but a successful present moment.
-Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make now the primary focus of your life.
-The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.
-Some changes seem negative on the surface, but you will find that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge..
-The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of superhuman achievement and the ego wants to keep things that way, but it is simply the natural state of feeling oneness with being..
-Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and continuous inner and outer conflict, but also the end of the fearsome bondage of incessant thought..
-Thinking has become a disease. Illness occurs when things get out of balance.
-Many live with a torturer on their heads who continually attacks, punishes, and drains their life energy. This causes suffering and unhappiness as well as illness..
-If the price of peace were a decrease in consciousness and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, they would not be worth having..
-One day you may find yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child..
-Instead of observing the thinker, you can also create a gap in the stream of the mind simply by directing the focus of attention to the now..
-The moment when beauty was first recognized was one of the most significant in the evolution of human consciousness..
-The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and that is the physical aspect of what we call fear..
-The psychological fear we are talking about always refers to something that could happen, not something that is already happening.
-If the structures of the human mind do not change, we will always end up creating the same world over and over again with the same ills and the same dysfunctions..
-As you grow older, you form a mental image of yourself based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We call this phantom me ego.
-The greatest catalyst for change in relationships is total acceptance of your partner as he is, completely stopping judging and trying to change him..
-Failure hides in every success and success in every failure.
-The mind becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future.
-Acceptance seems like a negative state, but it actually brings something completely new to this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is awareness.
-The recognition and acceptance of the facts allows you some freedom with respect to them.
-You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him the next. The real love does not have an opposite.
-How can you be resentful of someone who is sick? The only appropriate response is compassion.
-All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, of inner stillness..
-Make it a practice to withdraw your attention to the past and future when they are not needed.
-If you cannot accept what is, that implies that you can never accept people as they are..
-Mankind's greatest achievement is not his works of art, science or technology, but the recognition of his own dysfunction.
-Hearing the silence, wherever it is, is an easy and direct way to be present. Even if there is noise, there is always low silence and between sounds.
-It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated.
-Most people confuse the now with what happens in the now, but they are two different things..
-When you give full attention to the person you interact with, you remove the past and future from the relationship..
-Just be and enjoy being. If you are present you have no need to wait.
-When your attention moves you to the now, you are alert. It is as if you woke up from a dream: the dream of thought, the dream of the past and the future.
-When you enter the now, you leave the content of your mind. The ceaseless stream of thoughts subsides.
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