Anthony de Mello Quotes

A zealous disciple expressed a desire to teach others the Truth and asked the Master what he thought about this. The Master said, "Wait." Each year the disciple would return with the same request and each time the Master would give him the same reply: "Wait." One day he said to the Master, "When will I be ready to teach?" Said the Master, "When your excessive eagerness to teach has left you."

You want the little things that society has falsely taught you are essential for happiness. You want that.

"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."

If you search within your heart, you will find something there that will make it possible for you to understand: a spark of disenchantment and discontent, which if fanned into flame will become a raging forest fire that will burn up the whole of the illusory world you are living in, thereby unveiling to your wondering eyes the kingdom that you have always lived in unsuspectingly.

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.

"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."

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

If there is anything I can do about the future, right now, I shall do it. Then I’m going to just leave it alone and settle down to enjoy the present moment, because all the experience of my life has shown me that I can only cope with things when they are present, not before they occur. And that the present always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.

The Master insisted that what he taught was nothing, what he did was nothing. His disciples gradually discovered that Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything. That transformation is the consequence not of something done, but of something dropped.

In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get deprogrammed, get rid of those attachments.

The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"

The Master would insist that the final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept "God."

One year of life is worth more than twenty years of hibernation.

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

Don't ask the world to change....you change first.