All Quotes by Eckhart Tolle
“I'm grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes.”
“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”
“Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.”
“Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.”
“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.”
“To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.”
“In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind - in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.”
“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.”
“Don't wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.”
“Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.”
“What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. 'Who am I, then?' The one who sees that.”
“There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.”
“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.”
“So many people have this idea: I want to achieve something great or be somebody great. And they neglect the step that leads to greatness. They don't honor this step at this moment because they have this idea of some future moment where they are going to be great.”
“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.”
“Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can't stand the suffering anymore.”
“When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you.”
“Was Jesus the son of God? Yes. But so are you. You just haven't realized it yet.”
“If there are people you haven't forgiven, you're not going to really awaken. You have to let go.”
“The only thing you ever have is now.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Even the most seemingly unpleasant situations - if you become aligned with it, something good will emerge from that.”
“If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.”
“There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.”
“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.”
“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 a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?”
“Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.”
“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”
“People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.”
“You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.”
“The 'soul' is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are.”
“People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.”
“The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.”
“Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.”
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity.”
“The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.”
“Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour.”
“You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection - you cannot cope with the future.”
“You are not a problem that needs solving.”
“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.”
“If you are not living this moment, you are not really living.”
“If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.”
“For many people who are so lost in their minds, so much involved in their thought processes, the only moments they have when they are not trapped in that is when they are relating to their animal, their pet.”
“Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, 'Be still, and know that I am God.' But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don't need to carry it around with you after you've crossed the river.”
“You are the universe, you aren't in the universe.”
“The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.”
“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.”
“Memories are thoughts that arise. They're not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it's just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.”
“Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.”
“Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.”
“Thoughts are fine when you don't confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.”
“Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.”
“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.”
“You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection - you cannot cope with the future.”
“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately... you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.”
“Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.”
“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”
“There's not some idea I'm going to create a work that's going to change everybody's consciousness.”
“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.”
“Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.”
“Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.”
“I don't believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn't say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It's an ongoing process.”
“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.”
“Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there.”
“Jesus said, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' I think if he lived nowadays, instead of 'kingdom,' he would have said, 'dimension.' And 'heaven' refers to a sense of vastness or spaciousness.”
“Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.”
“That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.”
“We should purify our innate well of contentment - what a wonderful expression - and then external things will be in harmony with us.”
“When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you're waiting for the elevator - instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence.”
“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.”
“Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.”
“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.”
“I don't believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn't say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It's an ongoing process.”
“If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.”
“Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.”
“When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity - what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.”
“In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the 'we' rather than the 'I.'”
“Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The soul is your innermost being. The presence that you are beyond form. The consciousness that you are beyond form, that is the soul. That is who you are in essence.”
“Love is a state of being.”
“I sometimes ask people, 'Can you be aware of your own presence? Not the thoughts that you're having, not the emotions that you're having, but the very presence of your very being?' You become aware of your own presence by sensing the entire energy field in your body that is alive. And that is the totality of your presence.”
“To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.”
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
“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.”
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.”
“To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.”
“People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.”
“Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.”
“Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.”
“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.”
“Don't wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.”
“People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.”
“I don't believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn't say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It's an ongoing process.”
“The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.”
“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.”
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.”
“Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment, and imagine living your whole life like that. Always, this moment is not quite good enough because you need to get to the next one.”
““I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.””
“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
“When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in.”
“You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!”
“You can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”
“The ego … reduces the present to a means to an end.”
“Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.”
“The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.”
“The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.”
“The future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.”
“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.”
“If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. “How” is always more important than “what.” See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.”
“To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.”
“Ask yourself what “problem” you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?”
“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 an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.”
“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.”
“Every outer purpose is doomed to “fail” sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things.”
““I am bored.” Who knows this?You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.”
“Be there as the witnessing presence of your inner state. You don’t have to do anything. With the awareness comes transformation and freedom.”
“Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome? Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?Almost everyone lives like this most of the time. Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent. It does not honor life, which is Now and never not Now.”
“I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness.”
“By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form.”
“Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it. … Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?”
“To let go of judgment does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person.That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind.”
“If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.”
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
“… the ego's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between me and the other, without which it cannot survive.”
“Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer?”
“What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.”
“Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word.”
“When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.”
“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.”
“Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment...you can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.”
“The more unconscious individuals, groups, or nations are, the more likely it is that egoic pathology will assume the form of physical violence. Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right or another wrong. With very unconscious people, arguments can easily lead to physical violence.”
“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”
“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.”
“Instead of asking "what do I want from life?", a more powerful question is, "what does life want from me?"”
“You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.”
“Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”
“All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.”
“You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.”
“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.”
“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.”
“Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.”
“A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!”
“Being must be felt. It can't be thought.”
“Listen to people's stories and they all could be entitled "Why I Cannot Be At Peace Now" The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now.”
“Presence is a state of inner spaciousness.”
“Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.”
“Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.”
“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”
“The human condition: lost in thought.”
“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”
“What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.”
“We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.....”
“When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.”
“Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness.”
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.”
“Try to catch the voice in your head, in the very moment it complains about something. Recognise it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a thought.”
“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens to them for their happiness. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have.”
“The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.”
“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing that goodness to emerge. If peace is really what you want, then choose peace. The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.”
“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.”
“There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.”
“So many people have this idea: I want to achieve something great or be somebody great. And they neglect the step that leads to greatness. They don't honor this step at this moment because they have this idea of some future moment where they are going to be great.”
“No thought can encapsulate the vastness of the totality. Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments. This gives rise to fundamental misperceptions, for example, that there are separate things and events, or that this is the cause of that. Every thought implies a perspective, and every perspective, by its very nature, implies limitation, which ultimately means that it is not true, at least not absolutely. Only the whole is true, but the whole cannot be spoken or thought. Seen from beyond the limitation of thinking and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind, everything is happening now. All that ever has been or will be is now, outside of time, which is a mental construct.”
“It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.”
“The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.”
“The past has no power over the present moment.”
“People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.”
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.”
“As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love - even the most simple action.”
“It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.”
“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.”
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”