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.

This passage reflects Eckhart Tolle’s core teaching from the period when he popularized “presence” as a practical spiritual discipline, especially through his early-2000s writings and talks. It is framed within his critique of psychological time—habitual identification with memories and anticipation—which he argues fuels anxiety, regret, and compulsive striving. In that setting, Tolle contrasts clock time (useful for practical planning) with the mind’s incessant narrative about past and future, urging readers to return attention to immediate awareness. The quote is typically presented as guidance for meditation-like attentiveness in everyday life rather than as a comment on physics or literal unreality of time.

In Tolle’s teaching, “time” is largely a psychological construct: the mind’s habitual movement into memory (past) and anticipation (future). The quote argues that treating time as the scarce, valuable commodity misidentifies what is actually available to us—direct presence. “The Now” names the only point of contact with reality, where perception, action, and inner stillness can occur. The warning is practical as well as metaphysical: fixation on past/future fuels anxiety, regret, and compulsive striving, while attention to the present loosens egoic narratives and opens the possibility of peace. The “precious” thing, then, is not duration but awakened awareness.