Excerpt: These 32 Eckhart Tolle quotes from The Power of Now are deep and discuss why being present is so powerful and how it can transform your life.
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Introduction: Being Present May Be The Hardest Task To Accomplish
If you’ve ever tried to meditate, then you know how hard it is to be completely present for even a moment of time. Our brains are like monkeys diagnosed with ADD who just drank Red Bulls after taking a long nap—they’re out of control. We’re constantly wandering to different trains of thought, replaying past situations, simulating future situations, and thinking about seemingly random and arbitrary things like monkeys and Red Bull and squirrels.
If you haven’t ever tried meditating, try this exercise real quick. Get comfortable in your chair, close your eyes, and just try focusing on your breathing for a few minutes. Notice how quickly your mind deviates from your breath and starts thinking about something else. It’s almost instantaneous. I would be impressed if you could make it past 10 seconds without having a wandering thought. Seriously, try it.
This isn’t even taking into consideration all of the distractions that surround us. Trying to meditate or focus on being present in a quiet, controlled environment is one thing. Trying to do it when you have constant notifications popping up on your phone, advertisements from your nearby screens trying to reel you in, and a ton of chatter and commotion around you—changes the thing completely. And this is the challenge that most of us are up against.
Trying to be present is hard enough. Trying to be present in a world of distractions makes it harder. Trying to be present when we’re not even trying, makes it the hardest. The reason many of us are only making it harder for ourselves is because we’re living our lives reactively rather than responsibly. We wake up and have a blurry vision of what we want to accomplish for the day and rather than respond to what comes up proactively (and take responsibility), we react because we’re never mentally where we need to be—not really at least.
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We wake up in the morning and check our phones for what happened while we were asleep. We move from one task to whatever task “feels right” while trying to remember all that we have to do throughout the day. We sit down to do one task and we think about the next. We get to that next task and think about the task we just left. We try to get important work done but we end up checking our phones again. We put our phones down and then think about what we just read on one of our timelines. We look outside and think about how the weather was better on a past day. We project ourselves into the future and imagine a day when we’ll have that kind of beautiful weather again. We turn on the TV and escape from the reality of thinking at all and just veg out.
Being present is not nothing—it demands ALL of you. Don’t trust that you can just be present without trying—our minds don’t work like that. It takes careful planning, deliberate effort, and keen self-awareness.
Why careful planning? Because when you can properly organize your time and priorities, you can free your mind from the toils of the past and the anxieties of the future. Planning provides comfort in the choices you make (because you previously thought about them and decided on the best ones) and allows you to disconnect from the worry of uncertainty in your mind.
Why deliberate effort? Because as we saw above, our minds are out of control. We need to constantly remind ourselves to come back to the present moment—our breath—and re-focus on the here and now. Not the back-then and later. Without deliberate effort, our minds will do whatever they want—and being present just isn’t something they want. Why? Because when you’re present your mind ceases to exist. It’s gone. It’s just your senses and the world around you. And while this is one of the most blissful states, it’s also the state where the mind dies—and it doesn’t want that. It want’s to stay alive and wild and chaotic.
Why keen self-awareness? Because, at least in my experience, we rarely ever realize we’re not present. That’s why it’s said that we get “lost” in trains of thought. We’re not self-aware—we’re somewhere else. We have to train your brain to become a “watcher” of our thoughts rather than the subject of them. When we can witness our thoughts, we can direct them. But when we ARE the thoughts, we’re lost in them.
This is all to say that this moment is all we have. If you take it for granted, you might miss it—and you’ll never get it back. Get better at being present and you’ll get better. In every single way that I can think of. Good luck.
16 Quotes from The Power of Now on Just How Powerful The Present Moment Really Is:
In his book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle makes a case (and an incredibly persuasive one) that our ability to alleviate suffering in our lives is directly connected to our ability to re-connect to the NOW—in other words, our ability to be present-minded. Problems with relationships? It’s likely that both parties need to get out of their own heads and listen and communicate more presently. Are you stressed? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. Complaining? To complain is always nonacceptance of what IS. And the list goes on.
And don’t get it twisted, being present minded is not about ignoring challenges and looking at beautiful scenery. But rather about taking the weight of your mind away from the problems (which are mostly caused by the mind) and moving that weight to things that can help you with solutions—like being fully present for things that help improve your mood, free up thinking space, or better connect to your real emotions.
So, what’d you say we jump into it?! Below you will find our list of 32 quotes from The Power of Now that go much deeper than your ordinary quote and are packed with insight. Digest these Eckhart Tolle quotes slowly and really try to soak in all that these insights have to offer. They really can, quite literally, change your life and all in the matter of the few minutes it takes to read this post. Good luck and I hope they find you well!
“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 16)
“The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 49)
“Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered ‘speechless,’ sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 29)
“There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to salvation than it is at this moment. This may be hard to grasp for a mind accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the future. Nor can anything that you ever did or that was done to you in the past prevent you from saying yes to what is and taking your attention deeply into the Now. You cannot do this in the future. You do it now or not at all.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 147)
“Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 228)
“Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest, irritating, or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer. Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 77)
“I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 187)
“Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 194)
“The happiness that is derived from some secondary source is never very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the joy of Being, the vibrant peace that you find within as you enter the state of nonresistance. Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 188)
“Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 187)
“‘One day I’ll make it.’ Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, don’t you agree?”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 85) (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
“There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect. Your life situation consists of your circumstances and your experiences. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, for Being. The only point of access for that is the Now.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 86)
“Usually, the future is a replica of the past. Superficial changes are possible, but real transformation is rare and depends upon whether you can become present enough to dissolve the past by accessing the power of the Now. What you perceive as future is an intrinsic part of your state of consciousness now. If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future—which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 60)
“Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 86)
“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. It’s a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it any less insane. If you have to, you can move fast, work fast, or even run, without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present. As you move, work, run — do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high energy of that moment. Now you are no longer stressed, no longer splitting yourself in two. Just moving, running, working—and enjoying it. Or you can drop the whole thing and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind. It may say: ‘You should be working. You are wasting time.’ Observe the mind. Smile at it.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 84)
“Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 88)
16 Quotes from The Power of Now on Understanding and Dealing With Pain
“You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true. But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind—its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now—problems are actually interchangeable. If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 61)
“The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 168)
“When you deny emotional pain, everything you do or think as well as your relationships become contaminated with it. You broadcast it, so to speak, as the energy you emanate, and others will pick it up subliminally. If they are unconscious, they may even feel compelled to attack or hurt you in some way, or you may hurt them in an unconscious projection of your pain. You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 222)
“If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 25)
“The harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the ‘problem.’ Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 28)
“When there is no way out, there is still always a way through. So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it—don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it. Don’t let the mind us the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering. Since it is impossible to get away from the feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it; otherwise, nothing will shift. So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labeling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert, stay present—present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 222)
“Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does—do not resist what is. If there is no action you can take, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make you go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being. When you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the need for a great deal of doing on your part.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 210)
“Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn’t.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 178)
“Illness is not the problem. You are the problem—as long as the egoic mind is in control. When you are ill or disabled, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do not blame yourself either. All that is resistance. If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything ‘bad’ that happens in your life—use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness—and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 218)
“Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to—alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person—you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 152)
“If you no longer want to create pain for yourself and others, if you no longer want to add to the residue of past pain that still lives on in you, then don’t create any more time, or at least no more than is necessary to deal with the practical aspects of your life. How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say ‘yes’ to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 35)
“See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 82)
“Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems—most life situations are—but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now? When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 63)
“Make it a habit to monitor your mental-emotional state through self-observation. ‘Am I at ease at this moment?’ is a good question to ask yourself frequently. Or you can ask: ‘What’s going on inside me at this moment?’ Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 77)
“Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their ‘here’ is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 82)
“True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to ‘know God’ — not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 146)
Picture Quotes from The Power of Now to Share:
If you enjoyed these quotes from The Power of Now then you should consider reading Eckhart Tolle’s book in full. It comes highly recommended:
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…Ready To (Finally) Put An End To The Self-Improvement Yo-Yo-Ing?
Our NEW Guide will teach you how to integrate self-improvement tasks into your life—for life—without requiring NAVY Seal level self-discipline or grit. Download now and get INSTANT access to:
- 30 Powerful, One Page Meditations
- 30 Pace Conscious Challenges
- 30 Original, Downloadable Illustrations
…Build habits that stick or your money back.
Written by Matt Hogan
Founder of MoveMe Quotes. On a mission to help busy people do inner work—for better mental health; for healing; for personal growth. Find me on Twitter / IG / Medium. I also share daily insights here. 🌱
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