Top 250 Anthony de Mello Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”

— Anthony de Mello

Featured in: Quotes About Believing

2. “All is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well.”

— Anthony de Mello

3. “If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.”

— Anthony de Mello

4. “I leave you free to be yourself: to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking.”

— Anthony de Mello

5. “Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.”

— Anthony de Mello

6. “We do not have a fear of the unknown. What we fear is giving up the known.”

— Anthony de Mello

7. “Nothing has changed but my attitude, therefore, everything has changed.”

— Anthony de Mello

Featured in: Attitude Quotes

8. “What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.”

— Anthony de Mello

9. “All that you give to others you are giving to yourself.”

— Anthony de Mello

10. “May the peace of God disturb you always.”

— Anthony de Mello

11. “All conflict comes from attachment.”

— Anthony de Mello

12. “Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.”

— Anthony de Mello

13. “You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something.”

— Anthony de Mello

14. “If you look carefully you will see that there is one thing and only one thing that causes unhappiness. The name of that thing is attachment. What is an attachment? An emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.”

— Anthony de Mello

15. “Problems only exist in the human mind.”

— Anthony de Mello

16. “You are never in love with anyone. You’re only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person.”

— Anthony de Mello

17. “Live your life as you see fit. That’s not selfish. Selfish is to demand that others live their lives as you see fit.”

— Anthony de Mello

18. “Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.”

— Anthony de Mello

19. “Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.”

— Anthony de Mello

20. “When the sage points at the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.”

— Anthony de Mello

21. “Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.”

— Anthony de Mello

22. “Love springs from awareness.”

— Anthony de Mello

23. “I’m going to write a book someday and the title will be I’m an Ass, You’re an Ass. That’s the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you’re an ass. It’s wonderful. When people tell me, You’re wrong I say, What can you expect of an ass?”

— Anthony de Mello

24. “Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.”

— Anthony de Mello

Featured in: Quotes About Greed

25. “Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth.”

— Anthony de Mello

26. “Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything.”

— Anthony de Mello

27. “Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”

— Anthony de Mello

28. “The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.”

— Anthony de Mello

29. “If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future.”

— Anthony de Mello

30. “How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.”

— Anthony de Mello

31. “The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now To where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition...”

— Anthony de Mello

32. “Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop; then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness.”

— Anthony de Mello

33. “Look for competence not claims.”

— Anthony de Mello

34. “A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.”

— Anthony de Mello

35. “What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn’t harden itself to any persons or things.”

— Anthony de Mello

36. “Is there life before death? – that is the question!”

— Anthony de Mello

37. “Wisdom can be learned. But it cannot be taught .”

— Anthony de Mello

38. “We’re crazy, We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything.”

— Anthony de Mello

39. “Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?”

— Anthony de Mello

40. “The present moment is never intolerable. What’s intolerable is what’s going to happen in the next four hours. To have your body here at 8 pm and your mind at 10:30 pm, that’s what causes us suffering.”

— Anthony de Mello

41. “So love the thought of death, love it.”

— Anthony de Mello

42. “Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.”

— Anthony de Mello

43. “If you never condemned you would never need to forgive.”

— Anthony de Mello

44. “As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished. No reality fits ideology.”

— Anthony de Mello

45. “If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.”

— Anthony de Mello

46. “We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever. It’s only a flash and we waste it. We waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens.”

— Anthony de Mello

47. “What is love?“; “The total absence of fear,” said the Master; “What is it we fear?“; “Love,” said the Master.”

— Anthony de Mello

48. “You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.”

— Anthony de Mello

49. “Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality. Awareness releases reality to change you.”

— Anthony de Mello

50. “You have within yourself the answer to every question you propose – if you only knew how to look for it. In the Land of the spirit, you cannot walk by the light of someone else’s lamp. You want to borrow mine. I’d rather teach you how to make your own.”

— Anthony de Mello