Quotes from Anthony de Mello

How does one cope with evil? Not by fighting it but by understanding it. In understanding, it disappears. How does one cope with darkness? Not with one's fist. You don't chase darkness out of the room with a broom, you turn on a light. The more you fight darkness, the more real it becomes to you, and the more you exhaust yourself. But when you turn on the light of awareness, it melts.

To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.

Happiness is a state of nonillusion, of dropping the illusion.

Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see.

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you're not aware of. When you're aware of it, you're free from it. It's there, but you're not affected by it. You're not controlled by it; you're not enslaved by it. That's the difference.

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.

If you ever allow yourself to see it will be the death of you. And that is why love is so terrifying, for to love is to see and to see is to die. But it is the most delightful exhilarating experience in the whole world. For in the death of the ego is freedom, peace, serenity, joy.

See how you attempt to bring about change—both in yourself and in others—through the use of punishment and reward, through discipline and control, through sermonizing and guilt, through greed and pride, ambition and vanity, rather than through loving acceptance and patience, painstaking understanding and vigilant awareness.

What's the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?

Have you ever attempted to organize something like peace? The moment you do, you have power conflicts and group wars within the organization. The only way to have peace is to let it grow wild.

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

The important religious distinction is not between those who worship and those who do not worship but between those who love and those who don't.

So you must "receive" your demons, because when you fight them, you empower them.

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.

EAT YOUR OWN FRUIT A disciple once complained, "You tell us stories, but you never reveal their meaning to us." Said the master, "How would you like it if someone offered you fruit and masticated it before giving it to you?" No one can find your meaning for you. Not even the master.

Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them. Otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire, not as he or she is in themselves.

Hardly anyone has been told the following truth: In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get deprogrammed, get rid of those attachments.

Neuroti?ar je osoba koja brine zbog ne?ega što se nije dogodilo u prošlosti. On nije kao mi, normalni ljudi, koji brinemo zbog ne?ega što se ne?e dogoditi u budu?nosti.

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.

God went mad out of love for us. Then we must be very lovely. What we have stressed in the past is how lovely God must be that he can love us like this. But nobody has yet said how lovely we must be, that God could fall for us like this. Both are true.

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.

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?

When you're on the verge of going insane, raving mad, you're about to become either a psychotic or a mystic.

Said a disciple, 'I don't trade my love for money.' Said the Master, 'isn't itas bad - or worse - that you trade it for love?