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."

If you never condemned you would never need to forgive.

The feigning sleeper can delude others — he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself.

A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.

The Master never ceased to attack the notions about God that people entertain.

A disciple was one day recalling how Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed were branded as rebels and heretics by their contemporaries. Said the Master, Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy.

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

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 practise this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.

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

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

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

When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence.

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu's dictum: Those who know do not say; Those who say do not know. When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the master, "Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?" All of them indicated that they knew. Then he said, "put it into words." All of them were silent.

A disciple said to him, "I am ready, in the quest for God, to give up anything: wealth, friends, family, country, life itself. What else can a person give up?" The Master calmly replied, "One's beliefs about God."

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?"