Anthony de Mello Quotes

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.

I lack the Lord's own gentleness of heart, for I see deliberate malice where he sees ignorance and weakness.

When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.

"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."

The important religious distinction is not between those who worship and those who do not worship but between those who love and those who don’t.

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.

So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other.

The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: “The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.

there's not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to fear. Not one.

The first reaction is one of fear. It's not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That's what you fear.

You’re never so ready to forget yourself as when you are happy.

You can will an act of service but you cannot will love.

My commitment is not to consistency but to the Truth.

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.

The Master is not concerned with what we believe — only with what we see.