Eckhart Tolle

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 this moment.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about the situation.

When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.

This book is about you. It will change your state of consciousness or it will be meaningless.

How 'spiritual' you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness.

We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness.

There are people who have renounced all possessions who have a bigger ego than some millionaires.

Usually people are completely unaware of the roles they play. They are those roles.

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?

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you the acceptance of what *is*, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity—which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how *not* to make living and dying into a problem.

The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not ‘this moment.’ Is this not a fact?

As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.

Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.

Observe the mind. Smile at it.

There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.

In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.

I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes serious leakage of vital energy.

‘Unconscious,’ the way I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies complete absence of the watcher.

Just as you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body. Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what *is* at that moment.

The reason why you don’t put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it’s because you know that you’ll get burned. You don’t need fear to avoid unnecessary danger—just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.

If it is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that determines the future, then what is it that determines the quality of your consciousness? Your degree of presence. So the only place where true change can occur and where the past can be dissolved is the Now.

In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn’t, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.

Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.

The human condition: Lost in thought.

The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be?

Set goals, but know that the arriving is not all that important. When anything arises out of presence, it means this moment is not a means to an end: the doing is fulfilling in itself every moment. You are no longer reducing the Now as a means to an end, which is the egoic consciousness.

When you know who you truly are, there is an abiding alive sense of peace. You could call it joy because that’s what joy is: vibrantly alive peace.

Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.

Whatever your life situation, how would you feel if you completely accepted it as it is—right now?

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment. This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.