Top 100 Anthony De Mello Quotes
#1. The only way that someone can be of help to you is by challenging your ideas.
Anthony De Mello
#2. When God means you to be a healer he sends you patients; when he makes you a teacher he sends you pupils; when he destines you to be a Master he sends you stories .
Anthony De Mello
#3. Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.
Anthony De Mello
#4. Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.
Anthony De Mello
#6. Both what you run from-
and what you yearn for -
are within you.
Anthony De Mello
#7. Rare indeed, is the relationship in which the other is not cultivated for what one can get for oneself.
Anthony De Mello
#8. This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding;
my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.
Anthony De Mello
#9. I leave you free to be yourself: to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking.
Anthony De Mello
#10. Another illusion is that external events have the power to hurt you, that other people have the power to hurt you. They don't. It's you who give this power to them.
Anthony De Mello
#11. I have no fear of losing u, for you aren't an object of my property, or anyone else's. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.
Anthony De Mello
#12. Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.
Anthony De Mello
#14. One day, a philosopher asked, "What is the purpose of creation?" "Lovemaking," said the Master. Later, to his disciples, he said, "Before creation, love was. After creation, love was made. When love is consummated, creation will cease to be, and love will be forever."
Anthony De Mello
#15. You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.
Anthony De Mello
#16. Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when
you are alone?
Anthony De Mello
#17. If I haven't received any grace today, then I was not at home. This is because God is sending deliveries constantly.
Anthony De Mello
#18. The important thing is not to know who "I" is or what "I" is. You'll never succeed. There are no words for it. The important thing is to drop the labels.
Anthony De Mello
#19. I lack the Lord's own gentleness of heart, for I see deliberate malice where he sees ignorance and weakness.
Anthony De Mello
#21. Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.
Anthony De Mello
#23. One year of life is worth more than twenty years of hibernation.
Anthony De Mello
#24. Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.
Anthony De Mello
#25. If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.
Anthony De Mello
#28. Have you ever attempted to organize something like peace? The moment you do, you have power conflicts and group wars within the organization. The only way to have peace is to let it grow wild.
Anthony De Mello
#29. You are never in love with anyone. You're only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person.
Anthony De Mello
#30. There are two ways to wash dishes: One is to wash them in order to make them clean; the other is to wash them in order to wash them.
Anthony De Mello
#31. This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know.
Anthony De Mello
#32. What can I do to see Reality as it is?" The master smiled and said, "I have good news and bad news for you, my friend." "What's the bad news?" "There's nothing you can do to see it is a gift." "And what's the good news?" "There's nothing you can do to see it is a gift.
Anthony De Mello
#33. When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence.
Anthony De Mello
#34. Don't try to make them happy, you'll only get in trouble. Don't try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it irritates the pig.
Anthony De Mello
#35. In many ways we were drugged when we were young. We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause.
Anthony De Mello
#36. I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be I'm an Ass, You're an Ass. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, You're wrong I say, What can you expect of an ass?
Anthony De Mello
#37. There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law. 'Obedience keeps the rules,' he would say. 'Love knows when to break them.'
Anthony De Mello
#38. What is my identity ?" "Nothing," said the Master. "You mean that I am an emptiness and a void?" said the incredulous disciple. "Nothing that can be labeled." said the Master.
Anthony De Mello
#40. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.
Anthony De Mello
#41. The greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.
Anthony De Mello
#42. What is love?"; "The total absence of fear," said the Master; "What is it we fear?"; "Love," said the Master.
Anthony De Mello
#43. When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the mind is unobstructed the result is truth. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is joy and love.
Anthony De Mello
#44. Extend
your arms
in welcome
to the future.
The best
is yet to come!
Anthony De Mello
#45. The seeker says, "I do not know." That takes honesty. The master says, "I do not know." That takes a mystic's mind that knows things through non-knowing. The disciple says, "I know." That takes ignorance, in the form of borrowed knowledge.
Anthony De Mello
#46. If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.
Anthony De Mello
#47. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
Anthony De Mello
#48. When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you're giving it power.
Anthony De Mello
#49. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something.
Anthony De Mello
#51. Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?
Anthony De Mello
#52. Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.
Anthony De Mello
#53. The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.
Anthony De Mello
#54. All suffering comes from a person's inability to sit still and be alone.
Anthony De Mello
#55. You're not living until it doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it.
Anthony De Mello
#56. One always treads with a joyful step when one has dropped the burden called the ego.
Anthony De Mello
#57. The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine you're lying in your coffin ... Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn't it?
Anthony De Mello
#58. You're so ashamed of your past; drop it! You're so proud of your past; drop it!
Anthony De Mello
#59. Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.
Anthony De Mello
#60. It's only when you become love - in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments - that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything.
Anthony De Mello
#61. You are so proud of your intelligence," said the master. "You are like a like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.
Anthony De Mello
#62. Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.
Anthony De Mello
#63. Charity is never so lovely as when one has lost consciousness that one is practicing charity. 'You mean I helped you? I was enjoying myself. I was just doing my dance. It helped you, that's wonderful. Congratulations to you. No credit to me.
Anthony De Mello
#64. A disciple was one day recalling how Buddha , Jesus , Mohammed were branded as rebels and heretics by their contemporaries. Said the Master, Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy .
Anthony De Mello
#65. When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.
Anthony De Mello
#66. As one man said, "I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it." That's what spirituality is all about, you know: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you.
Anthony De Mello
#67. You keep insisting, I feel good because the world is right! Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That's what all the mystics are saying.
Anthony De Mello
#68. You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple.
Anthony De Mello
#69. All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I'm gone, I trust you will notice the river.
Anthony De Mello
#70. You have within yourself the answer to every question you propose - if you only knew how to look for it. In the Land of the spirit, you cannot walk by the light of someone else's lamp. You want to borrow mine. I'd rather teach you how to make your own.
Anthony De Mello
#71. "My former master taught me to accept birth and death." "Then what have you come to me for?" asked the master. "To learn to accept what lies in between."
Anthony De Mello
#72. All is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well.
Anthony De Mello
#73. People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.
Anthony De Mello
#75. Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.
Anthony De Mello
#76. The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.
Anthony De Mello
#77. "I seek the meaning of existence," said the stranger. "You are of course assuming," said the Master, "that existence has a meaning." "Doesn't it?" "When you experience existence as it is - not as you think it is you will discover that your question has no meaning," said the Master.
Anthony De Mello
#78. Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all - they are attempting nothing new.
Anthony De Mello
#79. Sinners often speak the truth. And saints have led people astray. Examine what is said, not the one who says it.
Anthony De Mello
#80. The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.
Anthony De Mello
#81. What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn't harden itself to any persons or things.
Anthony De Mello
#82. As the Japanese Zen masters say, "Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions". Drop your theories; don't seek the truth.
Anthony De Mello
#83. The world is right because I feel good.
p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990
Anthony De Mello
#84. The poor think they will be happy when they become rich. The rich think they will be happy when they are rid of their ulcers.
Anthony De Mello
#85. To be properly wicked, you do not have to break the Law. Just observe it to the letter.
Anthony De Mello
#86. People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.
Anthony De Mello
#88. You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone.
Anthony De Mello
#89. People who deliberate fully before they take a step will spend their lives on one leg
Anthony De Mello
#90. People kill for money or for power. But the most ruthless murderers are those who kill for their ideas.
Anthony De Mello
#91. Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.
Anthony De Mello
#92. "Why is everyone here so happy except me?" "Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere," said the Master. "Why don't I see goodness and beauty everywhere?" "Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside."
Anthony De Mello
#93. "What is the secret of your serenity?" Said the master: "Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable."
Anthony De Mello
#94. To those who seek to protect their ego true Peace brings only disturbance.
Anthony De Mello
#95. Said the monk: "All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars - where do they come from?" Said the master: "Where does your question come from?"
Anthony De Mello
#96. Say goodbye to golden yesterdays: or your heart will never learn to love the present.
Anthony De Mello
#97. Spirituality practiced in the state of activity is incomparably superior to that practiced in a state of withdrawel.
Anthony De Mello
#98. A newly married couple said, "What shall we do to make our love endure?" Said the Master, "Love other things together" ...
Anthony De Mello
#99. When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding ... you can be yourself. Relaxed. You'll no longer be driving with your brakes on.
Anthony De Mello
#100. The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now To where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition ...
Anthony De Mello
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