Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher, left behind a legacy of profound wisdom through his books, lectures, and unforgettable words. Anthony de Mello quotes continue to inspire readers around the world with their powerful blend of Eastern and Western philosophies, mindfulness, and spiritual awakening.
Whether you’re seeking clarity in your spiritual journey or simply need a moment of insight, these quotes serve as timeless reminders to live fully and consciously.
In this post, we’ve curated some of the most powerful Anthony de Mello quotes that will challenge your thinking and stir your soul.
Anthony de Mello Quotes
- What is love? The total absence of fear, said the Master. “What is it we fear?”. “Love,” said the Master.
2. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something.
3. Wisdom can be learned. But it cannot be taught.
4. As you identify less and less with the “me”, you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything. Do you know why? Because you are no longer afraid of being hurt or not liked. You no longer desire to impress anyone. Can you imagine the relief when you don’t have to impress anybody anymore? Oh, what a relief. Happiness at last!
5. To a visitor who asked to become his disciple the Master said, “You may live with me, but don’t become my follower.” “Whom, then, shall I follow?” “No one. The day you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.
6. Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? “He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change.” No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.
7. 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.
8. If you search within your heart, you will find something there that will make it possible for you to understand: a spark of disenchantment and discontent, which if fanned into flame will become a raging forest fire that will burn up the whole of the illusory world you are living in, thereby unveiling to your wondering eyes the kingdom that you have always lived in unsuspectingly.
9. What can I do to see Reality as it is?” The master smiled and said, “I have good news and bad news for you, my friend.” “What’s the bad news?” “There’s nothing you can do to see it is a gift.” “And what’s the good news?” “There’s nothing you can do to see it is a gift.
10. One day, a philosopher asked, “What is the purpose of creation?” “Lovemaking,” said the Master. Later, to his disciples, he said, “Before creation, love was. After creation, love was made. When love is consummated, creation will cease to be, and love will be forever.”
11. How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.
12. The devil has a Ph.D. in perfect logic.
13. 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.
14. This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.
15. Doesn’t everyone see Reality as it is?
16. When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. As long as you’re fighting it, you’re giving it power.
17. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom.
18. If what you said was true, where was the need to shout?
19. The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.
20. May the peace of God disturb you always.
21. 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.
22. If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.” “I know. An overwhelming passion for it.” “No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.
23. Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.
24. 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.
25. Take the leap! You cannot cross a chasm in little jumps.
26. So love the thought of death, love it.
27. All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I’m gone, I trust you will notice the river.
28. And increasingly – you know this and so do I we’re losing the youth everywhere. They hate us; they are not interested in having more fears and guilt laid on them. They’re not interested in more sermons and exhortations. But they are interested in learning about love. How can I be happy? How can I live? How can I taste the marvelous things that the mystics speak of?
29. 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.
30. Another illusion is that external events have the power to hurt you, that other people have the power to hurt you. They don’t. It’s you who give this power to them.
31. 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.
32. When someone offends you, you can raise your spirits to heights where offenses cannot reach.
33. The seeker says, “I do not know.” That takes honesty. The master says, “I do not know.” That takes a mystic’s mind that knows things through non-knowing. The disciple says, “I know.” That takes ignorance, in the form of borrowed knowledge.
34. You’re so ashamed of your past; drop it! You’re so proud of your past; drop it!
35. In many ways we were drugged when we were young. We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause.
36. 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.
37. “My former master taught me to accept birth and death.” “Then what have you come to me for?” asked the master. “To learn to accept what lies in between.”
38. Spirituality practiced in the state of activity is incomparably superior to that practiced in a state of withdrawel.
39. You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone.
40. Tell me,” said the atheist , “Is there a God really?” Said the master, “If you want me to be perfectly honest with you, I will not answer.” Later the disciples demanded to know why he had not answered. “Because the question is unanswerable,” said the Master. “So you are an atheist?” “Certainly not. The atheist makes the mistake of denying that of which nothing may be said… and the theist makes the mistake of affirming it.
41. The world is right because I feel good.
42. ”I have no fear of losing you, for you aren’t an object of my property, or anyone else’s. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.
43. Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.
44. Problems only exist in the human mind.
45. There is yet another illusion, that it is important to be respectable, to be loved and appreciated, to be important. Many say we have a natural urge to be loved and appreciated, to belong. That’s false. Drop this illusion and you will find happiness. We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to love, but not to be loved.
46. “I seek the meaning of existence,” said the stranger. “You are of course assuming,” said the Master, “that existence has a meaning.” “Doesn’t it?” “When you experience existence as it is – not as you think it is you will discover that your question has no meaning,” said the Master.
47. Love springs from awareness.
48. One always treads with a joyful step when one has dropped the burden called the ego.
49. Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.
50. You can will an act of service but you cannot will love.
51. There’s nothing you can do to see — it is a gift.
52. 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.
53. Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
54. 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.
55. Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That’s all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
56. Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all – they are attempting nothing new.
57. You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.
58. 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
59. The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you’re ready to listen and if you’re ready to be challenged, there’s one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It’s called self-observation.
60. The Master would insist that the final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept God.
61. 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!
62. 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.
63. When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.
64. Live your life as you see fit. That’s not selfish. Selfish is to demand that others live their lives as you see fit.
65. Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.
66. Nothing has changed but my attitude, therefore, everything has changed.
67. You know, all mystics – Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
68. 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?
69. The only way to change is by changing your understanding.
70. If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.
71. One year of life is worth more than twenty years of hibernation.
72. A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: ‘You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story.’
73. You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple.
74. No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.
75. When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding… you can be yourself. Relaxed. You’ll no longer be driving with your brakes on.
76. These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.
77. My life is like shattered glass.” said the visitor. “My soul is tainted with evil. Is there any hope for me? “Yes,” said the Master. “There is something whereby each broken thing is bound again and every stain made clean.” “What?” “Forgiveness” “Whom do I forgive?” “Everyone: Life, God, your neighbor especially yourself.” “How is that done?” “By understanding that no one is to blame,” said the Master. “NO ONE.
78. A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.
79. 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.
80. Take away human beings from this planet and life would go on, nature would go on in all its loveliness and violence. Where would the problem be? No problem. You created the problem. You are the problem. You identified with “me” and that is the problem. The feeling is in you, not in reality.
81. 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.
82. 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.
83. A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating – these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.
84. What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.
85. All suffering comes from a person’s inability to sit still and be alone.
86. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth.
87. This is what Wisdom means: To be changed without the slightest effort on your part, to be transformed, believe it or not, merely by waking to the reality that is not words , that lies beyond the reach of words. If you are fortunate enough to be Awakened thus, you will know why the finest language is the one that is not spoken, the finest action is the one that is not done and the finest change is the one that is not willed.
88. 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.
89. 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.
90. When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence.
91. The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet’s greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.
92. To those who seek to protect their ego true Peace brings only disturbance.
93. I was neurotic for years. I was anxious and depressed and selfish. Everyone kept telling me to change. I resented them and I agreed with them, and I wanted to change, but simply couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. Then one day someone said to me, Don’t change. I love you just as you are. Those words were music to my ears: Don’t change, Don’t change. Don’t change . . . I love you as you are. I relaxed. I came alive. And suddenly I changed!
94. All that you give to others you are giving to yourself.
95. Are you your clothes? Are you your name? Are you your profession? Stop identifying with them. They come and go
96. Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That’s the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I’m going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, “Wake up!” My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it fine; if you don’t, too bad! As the Arabs say, “The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.”
97. As the Japanese Zen masters say, “Don’t seek the truth; just drop your opinions”. Drop your theories; don’t seek the truth.
98. A prisoner lived in solitary confinement for years. He saw and spoke to no one and his meals were served through an opening in the wall. One day an ant came into his cell. The man contemplated it in fascination as it crawled around the room. He held it in the palm of his hand the better to observe it, gave it a grain or two, and kept it under his tin cup at night. One day it suddenly struck him that it had taken him ten long years of solitary confinement to open his eyes to the loveliness of an ant.
99. To fight evil with activity is like fighting darkness with one’s hands. So what you need is light, not fit.
100. A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.
101. “That of the person who sees other human beings as sinners,” said the Master.
102. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.
103. The poor think they will be happy when they become rich. The rich think they will be happy when they are rid of their ulcers.
104. Let’s suppose that rain washes out a picnic. Who is feeling negative? The rain? Or you? What’s causing the negative feeling? The rain or your reaction? When you bump your knee against a table, the table’s fine. It’s busy being what it was made to be – a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist only in the human mind. We might add: in the stupid, sleeping human mind.
105. When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.
106. 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.
107. 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.
108. My experience is that it’s precisely the ones who don’t know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.
109. People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.
110. When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the mind is unobstructed the result is truth. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is joy and love.
111. “Both what you run from – and what you yearn for – are within you.”
112. Nobody is afraid of the unknown, what you really fear is the loss of the known.
113. 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.
114. People kill for money or for power. But the most ruthless murderers are those who kill for their ideas.
115. 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 .
116. A disciple, in his reverence for the Master, looked upon him as God incarnate. “Tell me, O Master,” he said, “why you have come into this world.” “To teach fools like you to stop wasting their time worshiping Masters.
117. 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.
118. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.
119. When God means you to be a healer he sends you patients; when he makes you a teacher he sends you pupils; when he destines you to be a Master he sends you stories.
120. 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.
121. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows.
122. 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.
123. 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.
124. No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.
125. Is it possible for the rose to say, “I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad?” Or is it possible for the lamp to say, “I will give my light to the good people in this room, but I will withhold it from the evil people”? Or can a tree say, “I’ll give my shade to the good people who rest under me, but I will withhold it from the bad”? These are images of what love is about.
126. 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.
127. A newly married couple said, “What shall we do to make our love endure?” Said the Master, “Love other things together”.
128. Everybody was talking about the religious man who committed suicide. While no one in the monastery approved of the man’s action, some say they admired his faith. Faith?” said the Master. He had the courage of his convictions, didn’t he?” That was fanaticism, not faith. Faith demands a greater courage still: to reexamine one’s convictions and reject them if they do not fit the facts.
129. Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?
130. This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know.
131. “Why is everyone here so happy except me?” “Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere,” said the Master. “Why don’t I see goodness and beauty everywhere?” “Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.”
132. You are never in love with anyone. You’re only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person.
133. Religion is the finger pointing to God. People are too busy licking the finger to notice where it’s pointing.
134. Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.
135. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.
136. A lost coin is found by means of a candle; the deepest truth is found by means of a simple story.
137. We do not have a fear of the unknown. What we fear is giving up the known.
138. As the great Confucius said, “The one who would be in constant happiness must frequently change.” Flow. But we keep looking back, don’t we? We cling to things in the past and cling to things in the present…Do you want to enjoy a symphony? Don’t hold on to a few bars of the music. Don’t hold on to a couple of notes. Let them pass, let them flow. The whole enjoyment of a symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to pass.
139. All conflict comes from attachment.
140. If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.
141. 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.
142. When the sage points at the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.
143. Extend your arms in welcome to the future. The best is yet to come!
144. As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made . Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.
145. A Jesuit once wrote a note to Father Arrupe, his superior general, asking him about the relative value of communism, socialism and capitalism. Father Arrupe gave him a lovely reply. He said, “A system is about as good or as bad as the people who use it.” People with golden hearts would make capitalism or communism or socialism work beautifully.
146. 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.
147. The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.
148. Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.
149. You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.
150. Don’t ask the world to change….you change first.
151. The feigning sleeper can delude others he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself.
152. Problems exist only in the human mind.
153. The Master persistently warned against the attempt to encompass Reality in a concept or a name. A scholar in mysticism once asked, “When you speak of BEING, sir, is it eternal, transcendent being you speak of, or transient, contingent being?” The Master closed his eyes in thought. Then he opened them, put on his most disarming expression, and said, “Yes!”
154. 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.
156. Ordinarily, everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything.
157. A disciple asked, “Who is a Master?” The Master replied, “Anyone to whom it is given to let go of the ego. Such a person’s life is then a masterpiece.
158. If you make me your authority, you harm yourself because you will not see things for yourself, and you harm me too because you refuse to see me as I am.
159. You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.
160. Do you want a sign that you’re asleep? Here it is: you’re suffering. 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. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.
161. 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.
162. If I haven’t received any grace today, then I was not at home. This is because God is sending deliveries constantly.
163. Obedience keeps the rules. Love knows when to break them.
164. 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.
165. Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.
166. Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts – generally somebody else’s – mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.
167. We’re crazy, We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything.
168. The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being.
169. 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.
170. Rare indeed, is the relationship in which the other is not cultivated for what one can get for oneself.
171. You are so proud of your intelligence,” said the master. “You are like a like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.
172. Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth.
173. People who want to rise above a well-cooked meal and a well-tailored garment, are out of their spiritual minds.
174. Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.
175. I wish to become a teacher of the Truth.
176. Say goodbye to golden yesterdays: or your heart will never learn to love the present.
177. To a woman who complained about her destiny the Master said, “It is you who make your destiny.” “But surely I am not responsible for being born a woman?” “Being born a woman isn’t destiny. That is fate. Destiny is how you accept your womanhood and what you make of it.”
178. “Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when
you are alone?”
179. Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. Stop trying to change reality. That’s crazy! Stop trying to change the other person. We spend all our time and energy trying to change external circumstances, trying to change our spouses, our bosses, our friends, our enemies, and everybody else. We don’t have to change anything. Negative feelings are in you.
180. 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?”
181. “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’.
182. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
183. What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play.
184. 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 practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.
185. 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.
186. 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.
187. The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two.
188. Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.
189. People who deliberate fully before they take a step will spend their lives on one leg.
190. You’re not living until it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you’re ready to lose your life, you live it.
191. There comes a point in your life when you become stark raving insane, commit suicide or become a mystic.
192. A writer arrived at the monastery to write a book about the Master. “People say you are a genius . Are you?” he asked. “You might say so.” said the Master, none too modestly. “And what makes one a genius?” “The ability to recognize.” “Recognize what?” “The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being.
193. Is there life before death? – that is the question!
194. The best things in life cannot be willed into being.
195. 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.’
196. The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine you’re lying in your coffin….Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it?
197. Name one practical, down-to-earth effect of spirituality,” said the skeptic who was ready for an argument. “Here’s one,” said the Master. “When someone offends you, you can raise your spirits to heights where offenses cannot reach.
198. 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.
199. 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.
200. The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.” Said Diogenes, “Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.
201. Look for competence not claims.
202. Behold God beholding you…and smiling.
203. To relate is to react. To react is to understand oneself. To understand oneself is to be enlightened. Relationships are schools for enlightenment.
204. 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.
205. Said the master: “Where does your question come from?”
206. When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live.
207. The greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.
208. What is the work of a Master?” said a solemn-faced visitor. “To teach people to laugh ,” said the Master gravely.
209. 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.
210. As the Arabs say, “The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.
211. “You can never be free as long as you have an ego to defend.”
212. My commitment is not to consistency but to the Truth.
213. Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?
214. You keep insisting, I feel good because the world is right! Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That’s what all the mystics are saying.
215. The human mind makes foolish divisions in what love sees as one.
216. Sinners often speak the truth. And saints have led people astray. Examine what is said, not the one who says it.
217. 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?
218. “All is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well.
“
219. There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it’s because you’re thinking or focusing on what you don’t have….But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.
220. A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him. Finally he wrote the department of agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question: “What shall I do now?” In due course the reply came: “We suggest you learn to love them.”
221. You do not have to change for God to love you.
222. “What is the secret of your serenity?” Said the master: “Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable.”
223. 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.
224. People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.
225. Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything.
226. The law is an expression of God ‘s holy will and as such must be honored and loved,” said the preacher piously. “Rubbish,” said the Master. “The law is a necessary evil and as such must be cut down to the barest minimum. Show me a lover of the law and I will show you a muttonheaded tyrant.
227. “Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and
culture.”
228. 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.
229. As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished. No reality fits ideology.
230. If you never condemned you would never need to forgive.
Conclusion
The beauty of Anthony de Mello quotes lies in their simplicity and depth. Each one offers a mirror into your own consciousness, inviting you to awaken, reflect, and embrace the present moment.
Whether you’re revisiting his teachings or discovering them for the first time, these quotes are sure to leave a lasting impact. Keep these insights close as gentle reminders to live with awareness, compassion, and freedom.
For those on a journey of personal or spiritual growth, Anthony de Mello quotes are more than just words—they are guideposts to inner transformation.
