A Guide to the Present Moment Quotes

“In the absence of judgment, love is what remains.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Without our thoughts to create our unhappiness, we feel content right now.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Our intuition is always here to guide us, but we aren’t able to hear or feel it because our thoughts are too loud and take too much of our attention. Intuition is very subtle and can easily be overlooked when we are constantly listening to our thoughts and looking to our thoughts to help us make our decisions.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Situations themselves don’t create our emotional experience; it is only our thoughts about them that make us suffer.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“In the same way, if you don’t believe a thought (word) in your mind to be true, it won’t create an emotion.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“The reason is because fulfillment doesn’t come from receiving love; the feeling of happiness and completion we have always wanted comes from loving others.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“When our minds are silent, we can feel like a kid at playtime, yet still act however we feel is best for the situation at hand.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“We consistently label people, actions, words, situations, and events as “bad”, “not good enough”, or “wrong”. We say, “She is annoying”, “She is boring”, and “She is ugly” as if they were facts. Then we experience an emotional reaction to these labels, and we treat ourselves and others according to them.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“The experience of the present moment is quite simply what remains when no thought arises in our mind or we don’t engage in the action of believing a thought.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“When we use our thoughts to make decisions, we often decide to stay in situations that we don’t enjoy because our thoughts make us fear change. Since our thoughts are all inherently based on the past, if we listen to our thoughts on how to act, we are basing our decisions on the past instead of allowing ourselves to follow what feels true in this moment.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Eventually, you get to the point where your mind becomes crowded with so many thoughts that you very rarely get a break from them.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Suffering is emotional while pain is a physical sensation.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“We almost always seem to be waiting to be happy. We are either waiting for the next fun moment to distract ourselves from our discontent, or we are waiting to achieve the “perfect” circumstances. We might be waiting for work to be over, waiting for the weekend, waiting for our next vacation, waiting to find our soul mate, waiting for our children to get through their”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“As soon as you disbelieve a thought, you stop experiencing the emotion it created, and you automatically stop giving attention to that thought.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Sometimes we may feel sad or angry, but yet we are completely fine about it.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Distractions provide us with some relief from thoughts”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“- No matter how “perfect” our circumstances are, they don’t change our thoughts about “bad” events from our past that create our sadness, guilt, and anger.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“If we are waiting to be pain-free before we can finally be happy, we will likely be waiting for a long time.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“These scenarios demonstrate that when you believe someone’s words to be true, they create emotions. But when you don’t believe someone’s words, their words don’t have the power to create emotions.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Our relationship with our own thoughts dictates how enjoyable all of our relationships in life will be.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“For example, if our husband yells at us for misplacing the TV remote, then he is essentially choosing the “bad” action of yelling as punishment for what he believes to be the “bad” action of misplacing the TV remote. When this happens, we may then judge our husband to be “mean” for yelling at us. It may seem that his action was to yell at us for misplacing a TV remote, but if we look at it from a more fundamental level, he was really just punishing us for what he believed to be a “bad” action. Therefore, instead of asking ourselves, “Have I ever yelled at someone for misplacing a TV remote?”, we can ask ourselves, “Have I ever chosen to punish someone for what I believed to be a bad action?”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“What this means is that nobody can hurt you. Only you can hurt you.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“I was always paying attention to my thoughts about whether people were smart or stupid, attractive or ugly, nice or mean—or about what I wanted from them and how they were seeing me—rather than just purely seeing them.   Now”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Since getting what we want seems to make us happy, of course we are going to keep spending much of our life trying to make ourselves, our situation, and others “perfect”. But, as we may have come to realize, this strategy doesn’t really fulfill us. We tend to live life with a lot of suffering and discontent between our brief moments of happiness. When we get what we want, we only experience the present moment for a few minutes or days before our attention goes back to our other thoughts.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“If a specific thought has created a large portion of our suffering (for the last hour or 10 years), then we will be much happier without it.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“As soon as you stop believing someone's words, the emotion they created instantly dissolves.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Distractions are wonderful for us. They are the source of much of our happiness in life, and they provide us with much-needed relief from our suffering or discontent.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment

“Perfect” doesn’t exist without “imperfect” because “perfect” isn’t “perfect” unless we have something to compare it against. We can’t think that someone is “pretty” without thinking someone else is “ugly”.”
― Noah Elkrief, A Guide to the Present Moment