Top 100 Eckhart's Quotes
#1. Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna.
Thomas Merton
#2. The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say 'recognize' because you're not ... it's not new.
Eckhart Tolle
#3. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
Eckhart Tolle
#4. When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously, even if it's just gratitude for breathing, gratitude for the aliveness that you feel in your body. Gratitude is there when you acknowledge the aliveness of the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle
#5. 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
Eckhart Tolle
#6. The basis for true change is freedom from negativity. And that's what acceptance implies: no negativity about what is. And then you see what this moment requires: what is it that is required now so that life can express itself more fully?
Eckhart Tolle
#7. Whoever possesses God in their being has Him in a divine manner, and He shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.
Meister Eckhart
#8. If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are
the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.
Eckhart Tolle
#9. I believe that Jesus realized his oneness with God and he showed, what he attempted to do was show the way to all of us, how to realize our own onenes with God also, so he's a precursor.
Eckhart Tolle
#10. How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
Eckhart Tolle
#11. Attention is the vital thing and there is no tension in attention. It just happens to be a similar word. It's not concentration or straining. Attention has the openness of a young child not yet dominated by the conceptual mind.
Eckhart Tolle
#12. When there's somebody there who is transparent enough so that the stillness comes through unhindered, there's a reciprocal movement in you because the presence of stillness suddenly recognizes itself.
Eckhart Tolle
#13. It takes practice to hear your true desires. Your passion will often come as a whisper or serendipitous event that reminds you of what's important and what makes you happy.
Eckhart Tolle
#14. The ego's form of happiness can't exist without unhappiness. The ego will be happy when something good happens but unhappy when it ends.
Eckhart Tolle
#15. A huge number of people are going through the process of awakening, some in the early stages, some in later stages, and it's wonderful to see.
Eckhart Tolle
#16. A new heaven is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness. And A New Earth is it's direct reflection in the physical realm.
Eckhart Tolle
#17. Actually, the ability to choose presence depends on the degree of presence that's emerging in you. Ultimately, you are not choosing, there's nobody there to choose. When you think you are choosing, presence is simply emerging in that moment.
Eckhart Tolle
#18. The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
Eckhart Tolle
#19. So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself - in joy in my self.
Eckhart Tolle
#20. As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as "God," the religious seeker must set aside "any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#21. The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is.
Eckhart Tolle
#22. I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.
Aaron Eckhart
#23. Most humans live in the mindset that this moment is only important because it's getting them to the next one.
Eckhart Tolle
#24. If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that's a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.
Eckhart Tolle
#25. You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.
Aaron Eckhart
#26. And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.
Meister Eckhart
#27. There's a place in the soul where you've never been wounded.
Meister Eckhart
#28. Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.
Eckhart Tolle
#29. Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.
Eckhart Tolle
#30. Thinking is a wonderful tool if it's applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you're dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted.
Eckhart Tolle
#31. The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection.
Eckhart Tolle
#32. When I'm with people, I'm a spiritual teacher. That's the function, but it's not my identity. The moment I'm alone, my deepest joy is to benobody, to relinquish the function of a teacher. It's a temporary function.
Eckhart Tolle
#33. I think that maybe that's my weakness, in that I don't know how to do it, so I just do what I do and try to do it as passionately and as well as I can.
Aaron Eckhart
#34. Once bliss becomes normal it's no longer bliss, it's just peace.
Eckhart Tolle
#35. The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God's love; but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God.
Meister Eckhart
#36. Your car breaks down in the middle of the night. It's raining. It's cold. And you have to change the tire of your car. You cannot really enjoy that it is cold and wet, but you can bring acceptance to it. Peace flows into it.
Eckhart Tolle
#37. In today's rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.
Eckhart Tolle
#38. I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that's what I'm always looking for, a director that's going to help me go places I've never been before.
Aaron Eckhart
#39. A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart
#40. Psychological time, which is the mind's deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle
#41. When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, 'I don't have time.' But that's the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.
Eckhart Tolle
#42. Sometimes it's easier to see the madness in others
but we also have to see it in ourselves.
Eckhart Tolle
#43. Your primary purpose is to be here fully, and to be total in whatever you do so that the preciousness of the present moment does not become reduced to a means to an end. And there you have your life purpose. That's the very foundation of your life.
Eckhart Tolle
#44. It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.
Eckhart Tolle
#46. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
Eckhart Tolle
#47. 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
Eckhart Tolle
#48. Loss is very painful, because any kind of loss leaves a hole in the fabric of one's existence.
Eckhart Tolle
#49. Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him.
Meister Eckhart
#50. You are not 'in the now;' you are the now. That is your essential identity-the only thing that never changes. Life is always now. Now is consciousness. And consciousness is who you are. That's the equation.
Eckhart Tolle
#51. Whatever you do, whatever you're working with, whether it's manual work or talking to people or buying or selling, every little thing encompasses the power and simplicity of presence.
Eckhart Tolle
#52. When there's a teacher who embodies presence, then it seems to come for a while through that opening. The teacher is an opening to presence.
Eckhart Tolle
#53. There is nothing more to lose; there is nothing more to fear. Eckhart Tolle says this is "to die before you die," to live life knowing that because one day it'll all be gone, there's really nothing that you have, and so nothing you have to lose. Like
Mo Gawdat
#54. Filmmaking is a difficult process. There are the logistics of making a film. You have to do your part, and then change the entire thing around to do someone else's part. A lot of the magic is lost, in between that, and you have to figure out how to get it back.
Aaron Eckhart
#55. Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.
Eckhart Tolle
#56. Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else in which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly nature seeks, hunts, tries to ferret out the track on which God may be found.
Meister Eckhart
#57. I know that at the core of each religion there is the truth, heavily obscured in some cases, but it's there.
Eckhart Tolle
#58. The sun never sets. It is only an appearance due to the observer's limited perspective. And yet, what a sublime illusion it is.
Eckhart Tolle
#59. The other person's presence ultimately is the same as your presence, because it is in presence that there is true meeting.
Eckhart Tolle
#60. Nobody's life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn't it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?
Eckhart Tolle
#61. A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This
Eckhart Tolle
#62. Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour.
Eckhart Tolle
#63. Whatever you do in your daily life - driving from here to there, trying to reach someone on the phone, doing this or that - you always are going toward somewhere. That's inevitable.
Eckhart Tolle
#64. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there?
Eckhart Tolle
#65. I do not put much emphasis on periods of meditation - if you do meditation, it's fine - but the important thing is to bring the awareness into everyday life, into every little action that you do, into the varied challenges of everyday life.
Eckhart Tolle
#66. "Going with the flow" is for some people an excuse for not taking action and it refers usually to one's life situation.
Eckhart Tolle
#67. Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.
Eckhart Tolle
#68. Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.
Eckhart Tolle
#69. When you drop your expectations that a person, a situation, a place, or an object should fulfill you, it's easier to be present in this moment because you're no longer looking to the next one. Most people want to get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this moment.
Eckhart Tolle
#70. The consciousness of the animal begins to change when it interacts with a human who's gone beyond thinking. It's not only the animals assisting us; we are also assisting the animals.
Eckhart Tolle
#71. Yeah, but there's nobody who represents romance to me like Cary Grant.
Aaron Eckhart
#72. It's a wonderful thing to perceive the world and to interact with it and with other people and nature from that deep place of utter stillness, where the compulsion to immediately label and interpret whatever arises around you is no longer there.
Eckhart Tolle
#74. Allow your dog to take you for a walk every day. It's good for the body and it's good for the soul.
Eckhart Tolle
#75. Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being. There's a vast spaciousness. There's a vast stillness and there's a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn't separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.
Eckhart Tolle
#76. Every practice at some point will become a hindrance. No practice can ever take you there, to freedom, to liberation. That's important to realize.
Eckhart Tolle
#77. The evolutionary impulse is towards disidentification from thinking and the arising of awareness or presence, but the gravitational pull of the old consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, is still quite heavy. It's been around for thousands of years.
Eckhart Tolle
#78. 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.
Eckhart Tolle
#79. Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do, and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.
Eckhart Tolle
#80. Actors aren't fighters. They don't know how to throw a punch. So, there's a lot of hitting in the face. I'd much rather fight with a stuntman than another actor. I don't like fighting with other actors because somebody always ends up getting hurt.
Aaron Eckhart
#81. Submissive men, men who desire to serve as consensual slaves, are on one of the most difficult journeys in the world today, because they have rejected patriarchal privilege and embraced their own heart's calling instead.
TammyJo Eckhart
#82. Thought alone cannot recognize spiritual truths no matter how highly developed thought is. It's impossible.
Eckhart Tolle
#83. Peace can be threatening because peace is the absence of problems and conflict. There is something, perhaps in the personal you, that does not want freedom or peace, or the absence of problems. There's something that wants the opposite.
Eckhart Tolle
#84. I enjoy going to Starbucks, having a cup of coffee, sitting in my car, driving from here to there, sitting at home looking at the trees, going for a walk with a dog. It's all very enjoyable.
Eckhart Tolle
#85. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.
Eckhart Tolle
#86. When life takes away the forms that you thought were the foundation of your life, what's left? The life that needs no foundation - that is the foundation. The formless. The essence.
Eckhart Tolle
#87. The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.
Eckhart Tolle
#88. And the ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
Eckhart Tolle
#89. "I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment." That's the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
#90. 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.
Eckhart Tolle
#91. The ego is just waiting to identify with anything. Whether it's your misery or being a great meditator, it seeks some identification.
Eckhart Tolle
#92. If I thought it was my identity to be a spiritual teacher, that would be a delusion. It's not an identity. It's simply a function in this world.
Eckhart Tolle
#93. An emotion is your body's reaction to your mind.
Eckhart Tolle
#94. Don't think of yourself as having a past, don't think of yourself as having a future. What's left?
Eckhart Tolle
#95. 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. It is the joy of knowing yourself as the very life essence before life takes on form. That is the joy of Being - of being who you truly are.
Eckhart Tolle
#96. Once you have a theory, it's not too hard to find evidence to substantiate it, at least until some other theory comes along.
Eckhart Tolle
#97. One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it's measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.
Eckhart Tolle
#98. How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others.
Eckhart Tolle
#99. A built-in reminder is the simple understanding that whenever any kind of unhappiness arises, you know you've lost the now. That's a built-in alarm clock. The moment you realize you've lost the now, come back to the now.
Eckhart Tolle
#100. Go within. Use the inner body as a starting point for going deeper and taking your attention away from where it's usually lodged, in the thinking mind.
Eckhart Tolle
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