Quotes from Eckhart Tolle

Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.

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

Real love doesn't make you suffer.

Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.

If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. It will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it. In the state of enlightenment, you *are* yourself. There is no self that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.

It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In

The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are engaged in doing anything at all—from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.

When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself.

The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger.

Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form—or a species—will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.

T]he moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

If you remain in conscious connection with the Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much. You have "overcome the world," in the words of Jesus, or, as the Buddha put it, you have "crossed over to the other shore.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As

More consciousness means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.

your presence, your consciousness

When your consciousness is directed outward, mind and world arise. When it is directed inward, it realizes its own Source and returns home into the Unmanifested.

Remember, your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness.

A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.

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.

Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That's not a judgment. It's a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.

All creativity comes out of inner spaciousness.

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite.