Anthony de Mello Quotes - Page 7

People kill for money or for power. But the most ruthless murderers are those who kill for their ideas.

Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

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

Isn't there such a thing as social liberation?" "Of course there is," said the Master. "How would you describe it?" "Liberation from the need to belong to the herd.

In many ways we were drugged when we were young. We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause.

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.

If I haven't received any grace today, then I was not at home. This is because God is sending deliveries constantly.

It's only when you become love - in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments - that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything.

Take the leap! You cannot cross a chasm in little jumps.

There is no explanation you can give that will explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world! You'll never explain it. Because life is a mystery, which means your thinking mind cannot make sense of it. For that you've got to wake up and then you'll suddenly realize that reality is not the problem, you are the problem.

You will seek for God in vain till you understand that God can't be seen as a "thing"; he needs a special way of looking - similar to that of little children whose sight is undistorted by prefabricated doctrines and beliefs.

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

The important thing is not to know who "I" is or what "I" is. You'll never succeed. There are no words for it. The important thing is to drop the labels.

The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now being taken as descriptions. He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.

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 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.

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

Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, 'We don't know?' The fact is that you're surrounded -God and you don't see God, because you KNOW ABOUT God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know. The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. All revelations, however divine, are never any more than a finger pointing at the moon. As we say in the East, 'When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger'.

It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!

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

The devil has a Ph.D. in perfect logic.

Charity is never so lovely as when one has lost consciousness that one is practicing charity. 'You mean I helped you? I was enjoying myself. I was just doing my dance. It helped you, that's wonderful. Congratulations to you. No credit to me.

Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts - generally somebody else's - mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.

Problems exist only in the human mind.