50+ Powerful Eckhart Tolle Quotes to Keep You Present and Grounded

As you’ll soon discover, there is so much wisdom in Eckhart Tolle quotes, that it can be difficult to summarize in a few words.

Tolle is a German-Canadian author and spiritual teacher. Born in 1948, Tolle was depressed for much of his life until he experienced an “inner transformation” at the age of 29. Following this, he embarked on a journey of self discovery that ultimately led him to become a spiritual teacher.

The term “spiritual teacher” can be charged for some. While some of Tolle’s teachings are informed by religion, he is not a religious person nor does he preach any form of religion. His published works have a heavy emphasis on mindfulness and living in the now, topics that are spiritual in nature but not expressly religious.

Tolle has published multiple New York Times bestsellers, including The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Inner Purpose.

I was first introduced to The Power of Now over a decade ago. His teachings honestly didn’t land with me at the time. I don’t think they could have. I was too young, too inexperienced in life. But I’ve sense revisited both The Power of Now and A New Earth, and now I can confidently say that Tolle’s wisdom runs very deep. In 2008, Oprah Winfrey co-hosted a web series with Tolle called, A New Earth. It is an enlightening production and available to watch on-demand on OWN.

Tolle’s teachings focus on the concepts of self-discovery, mindfulness, and acceptance. All of which are essential components to creating a life outstanding.

Here are more than 50 outstanding quotes to inspire your journey (or even your personal manifesto):

On Acceptance

1. Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
2. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
3. Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.
4. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly.
5. When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
6. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is.
   

On Perspective

7. What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly.
8. Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.
9. Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
10. Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
    

On Mindfulness

11. To know another human being in their essence, you don’t really need to know anything about them — their past, their history, their story.
12. In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just being.
13. People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.
14. Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
15. Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.
16. If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.
17. Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.
18. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
19. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” 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.
20. Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there.
21. Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
    

On Being Present

22. The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.
23. When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what’s around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.
24. Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
25. Most humans are never fully present in the now because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
26. The past has no power over the present moment.
    

On Self-Discovery

27. What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.
28. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
29. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this, or I am that, but I Am.
30. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
31. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.
32. Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.
33. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.
34. Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.
35. Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
36. 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.
37. Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.
38. 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.
39. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
40. Each person’s life — each life-form, in fact — represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself.
41. Give up defining yourself.
42. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
43. There’s something in everybody that longs for that awakening to be more true to yourself.
    

On Life

44. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
45. 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.
46. Life will give you whatever experience is the most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
47. Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.
48. Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment… Surrender to what is. Say ‘yes’ to life — and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you.
49. Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment — a means to an end.
50. Doing is never enough if you neglect being.
    

On Love

51. To love is to recognize yourself in another.
52. 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.
    

On Happiness

53. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
54. There are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.
55. Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.
56. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.