Top 250 Anthony de Mello Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The root of evil is within you. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself and you understand. Nourish yourself on wholesome food, good wholesome food. I’m not talking about actual food, I’m talking about sunsets, about nature, about a good movie, about a good book, about enjoyable work, about good company, and hopefully you will break your addictions to those other feelings.”

— Anthony de Mello

152. “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.”

— Anthony de Mello

153. “If what you said was true, where was the need to shout?”

— Anthony de Mello

154. “Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.”

— Anthony de Mello

155. “A lost coin is found by means of a candle; the deepest truth is found by means of a simple story.”

— Anthony de Mello

156. “God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God ties it up again. Making a knot, bringing you a little closer to Him. Again and again your sins cut the string and with each knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.”

— Anthony de Mello

157. “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.”

— Anthony de Mello

158. “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.”

— Anthony de Mello

159. “Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.”

— Anthony de Mello

160. “You want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be hoping. But then, you forget that you have it all right now anyway, and you don’t know it. Why not concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?”

— Anthony de Mello

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

— Anthony de Mello

162. “If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.”

— Anthony de Mello

163. “Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?”

— Anthony de Mello

164. “Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all – they are attempting nothing new.”

— Anthony de Mello

165. “Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.”

— Anthony de Mello

166. “When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. As long as you’re fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it.”

— Anthony de Mello

167. “All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.”

— Anthony de Mello

168. “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.”

— Anthony de Mello

169. “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.”

— Anthony de Mello

170. “There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law. ‘Obedience keeps the rules,’ he would say. ‘Love knows when to break them.’”

— Anthony de Mello

171. “I wish to become a teacher of the Truth.”

— Anthony de Mello

172. “Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows.”

— Anthony de Mello

173. “What’s the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?”

— Anthony de Mello

174. “Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities.”

— Anthony de Mello

175. “If you find me charming, it means that right now you’re in a good mood, nothing more.”

— Anthony de Mello

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

— Anthony de Mello

177. “To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.”

— Anthony de Mello

178. “The content of your awareness is less important than the quality of the awareness.”

— Anthony de Mello

179. “This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.”

— Anthony de Mello

180. “People who want to rise above a well-cooked meal and a well-tailored garment, are out of their spiritual minds.”

— Anthony de Mello

181. “The world is right because I feel good. p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990.”

— Anthony de Mello

182. “The master never seemed to have his fill of gazing at his firstborn child. “What do you want him to be when he grows up?” someone asked. “Outrageously happy,” said the master.”

— Anthony de Mello

183. “When we talk about self-worth, are we not talking, really, about how we are reflected in the mirrors of other people’s minds?”

— Anthony de Mello

184. “If your God comes to your rescue and gets you out of trouble it is time you started looking for the true God.”

— Anthony de Mello

185. “The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.”

— Anthony de Mello

186. “No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.”

— Anthony de Mello

187. “There’s nothing you can do to see – it is a gift.”

— Anthony de Mello

188. “So you must “receive” your demons, because when you fight them, you empower them.”

— Anthony de Mello

189. “I don’t identify with the feeling. “I” is not that feeling. “I” am not lonely, “I” am not depressed, “I” am not disappointed. Disappointment is there, one watches it. You’d be amazed how quickly it glides away. Anything you’re aware of keeps changing; clouds keep moving. As you do this, you also get all kinds of insights into why clouds were coming in the first place.”

— Anthony de Mello

190. “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.”

— Anthony de Mello

191. “Happiness is a state of nonillusion, of dropping the illusion.”

— Anthony de Mello

192. “I feel good because the world is right.” Wrong! The world is right because I feel good.”

— Anthony de Mello

193. “Say your thing and get out of here. And if they profit, that’s fine, and if they don’t, too bad!”

— Anthony de Mello

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

— Anthony de Mello

195. “True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned.”

— Anthony de Mello

196. “So, we were born happy. We lost it. We were born with the gift of life. We lost it. We’ve got to rediscover it. Why did we lose it? Because we were working actively. They taught us to work actively, to make ourselves miserable. How did they do that? By teaching us to become attached. By teaching us to have desires so intense that we would refuse to be happy unless they were fulfilled.”

— Anthony de Mello

197. “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, for all you do is see for the first time what you have always been looking at. Who ever heard of a path that brings you to yourself or a method that makes you what you have always been? Spirituality, after all, is only a matter of becoming what you really are.”

— Anthony de Mello

198. “This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know.”

— Anthony de Mello

199. “Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere.”

— Anthony de Mello

200. “But to depend on another psychologically – to depend on another emotionally – what does that imply? It means to depend on another human being for my happiness. Think about that. Because if you do, the next thing you will be doing, whether you’re aware of it or not, is demanding that other people contribute to your happiness.”

— Anthony de Mello