Eckhart Tolle Quotes

The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

It seems that the one thing that doesn't change is people's reaction to short-term conditions and their axiomatic ability to perpetuate them far into the future.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

People negotiate their way around how a human mind works and find blind points. That's how people steal effectively.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

There is, however, no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

Denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

We don’t usually know how to see beyond our presuppositions (the reason, of course, why so many false views of indubitable past geniuses seem so strange to us today.)

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire

Most men … can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Most people when they come after you for advice come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices.

A feeling is not a fact.

Man tends to treat all of his opinions as principles.

The sad truth is that many behavioral economists know very little about psychology.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

People are going to believe what they want to believe.

We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives - things we've learnt since childhood that we don't even consciously realise are going on.