Anthony de Mello Quotes - Page 4

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You dont change. But when you understand it, it changes.

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.

Are you your clothes? Are you your name? Are you your profession? Stop identifying with them. They come and go

You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.

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.

All suffering comes from a person's inability to sit still and be alone.

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?

Nothing has changed but my attitude, therefore, everything has changed.

Said the monk: "All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars - where do they come from?" Said the master: "Where does your question come from?"

Religion is the finger pointing to God. People are too busy licking the finger to notice where it's pointing.

What is my identity ?" "Nothing," said the Master. "You mean that I am an emptiness and a void?" said the incredulous disciple. "Nothing that can be labeled." said the Master.

When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.

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

No person on earth has the power to make you unhappy. There is no event on earth that has the power to disturb you or hurt you. No event, condition, situation, or person. Nobody told you this; they told you the opposite. That's why you're in the mess you're in right now. That is why you're asleep. They never told you this. But it's self-evident.

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.

Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

All that you give to others you are giving to yourself.

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.

What, concretely, is Enlightenment ?" "Seeing Reality as it is," said the Master. "Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?" "Oh, no! Most people see it as they think it is." "What's the difference?" "The difference between thinking you are drowning in a stormy sea and knowing you cannot drown because there isn't any water in sight for miles around.

There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion

People who deliberate fully before they take a step will spend their lives on one leg

You've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.

The best things in life cannot be willed into being.

If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.