Eckhart Tolle

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.

When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power.

Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action—just give attention to the action itself.

The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction—you don’t look to it for salvation.

Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside.

Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being. You have found the life underneath your life situation. p. 47

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.

In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.

The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. p. 24

The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. ... Both are illusions.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.