Quotes from Anthony de Mello

You want freedom? Here it is: 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.

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

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

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

Repentance brings an intense desire for God, deep gratitude, and a growth in self-awareness that increases our freedom to love.

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

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.

And how about you? Do you want to understand and play the game of life or fool around with miracles?

I feel good because the world is right." Wrong! The world is right because I feel good.

As the Japanese Zen masters say, "Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions.

Do you know one sign that you've woken up? It's when you are asking yourself, "Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?

Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don't have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.

Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed." But there's a difference: I don't identify with it anymore.

The content of your awareness is less important than the quality of the awareness

there's not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to fear. Not one.

A tu gde je strah nema ljubavi, jer uvek mrzimo ono ?ega se plašimo.

There is another way besides laborious self-punishment on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. This is far from easy because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else.

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities.

if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it.

What we need is not just action that will bring about change but sight that will bring about love.

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.

The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: "The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.

Your attitude should be: "I want to be aware, I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen; if I'm awake, fine, and if I'm asleep, fine.

Recall those lovely words of Buddha when he said, "Monks and scholars must not accept my words out of respect, but must analyze them the way a goldsmith analyzes gold—by cutting, scraping, rubbing, melting.