Anthony de Mello Quotes

No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.

All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.

Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them. Otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire, not as he or she is in themselves.

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.

Said a disciple, 'I don't trade my love for money.'

Said the Master, 'isn't itas bad - or worse - that you trade it for love?

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you're not aware of. When you're aware of it, you're free from it. It's there, but you're not affected by it. You're not controlled by it; you're not enslaved by it. That's the difference.

if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it.

"Help us to find God." "No one can help you there." "Why not?" "For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean."

I have no fear of losing you, 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

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.

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities.

The master made it his task to systematically destroy every doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now taken as descriptions. He loved to quote the Eastern saying: "When the sage points at the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger."

Like the little girl who says to a little boy, "Are you a Presbyterian?" And he says, "No, we belong to another abomination!

"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."