Anthony de Mello Quotes

The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.

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.

"Tell me," said the atheist, "Is there a God — really?" Said the master, "If you want me to be perfectly honest with you, I will not answer." Later the disciples demanded to know why he had not answered. "Because the question is unanswerable," said the Master. "So you are an atheist?" "Certainly not. The atheist makes the mistake of denying that of which nothing may be said... and the theist makes the mistake of affirming it.

Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed by society to be unhappy, and so, no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail? Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are. It's only when they make contacted with joy that they understand how depressed they have been.

The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.

The Master was allergic to ideologies. "In a war of ideas," he said, "it is people who are the casualties." Later he elaborated: "People kill for money or for power. But the most ruthless murderers are those who kill for their ideas."

EAT YOUR OWN FRUIT A disciple once complained, "You tell us stories, but you never reveal their meaning to us." Said the master, "How would you like it if someone offered you fruit and masticated it before giving it to you?" No one can find your meaning for you. Not even the master.

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.

SERENITY “Are there ways for gauging one’s spiritual strength?” “Many.” “Give us one.” “Find out how often you become disturbed in the course of a single day.

"Name one practical, down-to-earth effect of spirituality," said the skeptic who was ready for an argument. "Here's one," said the Master. "When someone offends you, you can raise your spirits to heights where offenses cannot reach."

The Master would frequently assert that holiness was less a matter of what one did than of what one allowed to happen.

Certainty is the culprit. The spiritual person knows uncertainty — a state of mind unknown to the religious fanatic.

Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.

Isn't there such a thing as social liberation?" "Of course there is," said the Master. "How would you describe it?" "Liberation from the need to belong to the herd."

When your mother got angry with you, she didn't say there was something wrong with her, she said there was something wrong with you; otherwise she wouldn't have been angry. Well, I made the great discovery that if you are angry, Mother, there's something wrong with you. So you'd better cope with your anger. Stay with it and cope with it. It's not mine. Whether there's something wrong with me or not, I'll examine that independently of your anger. I'm not going to be influenced by your anger.