Anthony de Mello Quotes

Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.

Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.

Problems exist only in the human mind.

The present moment is never intolerable. What's intolerable is what's going to happen in the next four hours. To have your body here at 8 pm and your mind at 10:30 pm, that's what causes us suffering.

There is no explanation you can give that will explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world! You'll never explain it. Because life is a mystery, which means your thinking mind cannot make sense of it. For that you've got to wake up and then you'll suddenly realize that reality is not the problem, you are the problem.

If I haven't received any grace today, then I was not at home. This is because God is sending deliveries constantly.

"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."

You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You dont change. But when you understand it, it changes.

"That of the person who sees other human beings as sinners," said the Master.

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made . Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.

The world is right because I feel good. p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990

When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you’re giving it power.

This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.

Behold God beholding you...and smiling.

Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.

Problems only exist in the human mind.

Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I'm going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it fine; if you don't, too bad! As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens."

And increasingly - you know this and so do I we're losing the youth everywhere. They hate us; they are not interested in having more fears and guilt laid on them. They're not interested in more sermons and exhortations. But they are interested in learning about love. How can I be happy? How can I live? How can I taste the marvelous things that the mystics speak of?

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.

Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

People kill for money or for power. But the most ruthless murderers are those who kill for their ideas.

The only way to change is by changing your understanding.

If what you said was true, where was the need to shout?

Are you your clothes? Are you your name? Are you your profession? Stop identifying with them. They come and go

Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.

Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you're living in an illusion. There's something seriously wrong with you. You're not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? "He is to blame, she is to blame. She's got to change." No! The world's all right. The one who has to change is you.

The devil has a Ph.D. in perfect logic.

Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all - they are attempting nothing new.

My experience is that it's precisely the ones who don't know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.

Take the leap! You cannot cross a chasm in little jumps.

To fight evil with activity is like fighting darkness with one's hands. So what you need is light, not fit.

We're crazy, We're living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything.

Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.

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.

Rare indeed, is the relationship in which the other is not cultivated for what one can get for oneself.

When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.

There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion

The master never seemed to have his fill of gazing at his firstborn child. "What do you want him to be when he grows up?" someone asked. "Outrageously happy," said the master.

As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.

God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God ties it up again. Making a knot, bringing you a little closer to Him. Again and again your sins cut the string and with each knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.

There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.

Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts - generally somebody else's - mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.

Live your life as you see fit. That's not selfish. Selfish is to demand that others live their lives as you see fit.

This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know.

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."