Anthony De Mello Quotes

• 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. 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.

• 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.

• "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."

• 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.

• To a disciple who was forever complaining about others the Master said, "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."

• 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."

• 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."

• "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."
  "What then is a Master for?"
  "To make you see the uselessness of having one."

• "Help us to find God."
  "No one can help you there."
  "Why not?"
  "For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean."

• To a visitor who described himself as a seeker after Truth the Master said, "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."

• Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

• 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."

• Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.

• 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.

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

• Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.

• The Master is not concerned with what we believe — only with what we see.

• The Master would frequently assert that holiness was less a matter of what one did than of what one allowed to happen.

• Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

• A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.

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

• 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 feigning sleeper can delude others — he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself.

• The Master insisted that what he taught was nothing, what he did was nothing.
  His disciples gradually discovered that Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything.
  That transformation is the consequence not of something done, but of something dropped.

•  "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."

• "What kind of a person does Enlightenment produce?"
  Said the Master:
  "To be public-spirited and belong to no party,
  to move without being bound to any given course,
  to take things as they come,
  have no remorse for the past,
  no anxiety for the future,
  to move when pushed,
  to come when dragged,
  to be like a mighty gale,
  like a feather in the wind,
  like weeds floating on a river,
  like a mill-stone meekly grinding,
  to love all creation equally
  as heaven and earth are equal to all
  — such is the product of Enlightenment."
  On hearing these words one of the younger disciples cried, "This sort of teaching is not for the living but for the dead," and walked away, never to return.

• Johnny goes to modeling class in his school for special children and he gets his piece of putty and he's modeling it. He takes a little lump of putty and goes to a corner of the room and he's playing with it. The teacher comes up to him and says, "Hi, Johnny." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the teacher says, "What's that you've got in your hand?" And Johnny says, "This is a lump of cow dung." The teacher asks, "What are you making out of it?" He says, "I'm making a teacher."
  The teacher thought, "Little Johnny has regressed." So she calls out to the principal, who was passing by the door at that moment, and says, "Johnny has regressed."
  So the principal goes up to Johnny and says, "Hi, son." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the principal says, "What do you have in your hand?" And he says, "A lump of cow dung." "What are you making out of it?" And he says, "A principal."
  The principal thinks that this is a case for the school psychologist. "Send for the psychologist!"
  The psychologist is a clever guy. He goes up and says, "Hi." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the psychologist says, "I know what you've got in your hand." "What?" "A lump cow dung." Johnny says, "Right." "And I know what you're making out of it." "What?" "You're making a psychologist." "Wrong. Not enough cow dung!"

• 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?"

• 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. One sign that you're awakened is that you don't give a damn about what's going to happen in the next life. You're not bothered about it; you don't care. You are not interested, period.

• Do you know what eternal life is? You think it's everlasting life. But your own theologians will tell you that that is crazy, because everlasting is still within time. It is time perduring forever. Eternal means timeless — no time. The human mind cannot understand that. The human mind can understand time and can deny time. What is timeless is beyond our comprehension. Yet the mystics tell us that eternity is right now. How's that for good news? It is right now. People are so distressed when I tell them to forget their past. They're crazy! Just drop it! When you hear "Repent for your past," realize it's a great religious distraction from waking up. Wake up! That's what repent means. Not "weep for your sins.": Wake up! understand, stop all the crying. Understand! Wake up!

• 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.

• 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 points out that there is falsehood somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality when your falsehoods clash with the truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

• 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. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because 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. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!

• 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. 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! You no longer feel the need or the compulsion to explain things anymore. It's all right. What is there to be explained? And you don't feel the need or compulsion to apologize anymore. I'd much rather hear you say, "I've come awake," than hear you say, "I'm sorry." I'd much rather hear you say to me, "I've come awake since we last met; what I did to you won't happen again," than to hear you say, "I'm so sorry for what I did to you."

• 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. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

• No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.

• 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.

• "When you speak about Reality," said the Master, "you are attempting to put the Inexpressible into words, so your words are certain to be misunderstood. Thus people who read that expression of Reality called the Scriptures become stupid and cruel for they follow, not their common sense, but what they think their Scriptures say."
  He had the perfect parable to show this: A village blacksmith found an apprentice willing to work hard at low pay. The smith immediately began his instructions to the lad: "When I take the metal out of the fire, I'll lay it on the anvil; and when I nod my head you hit it with the hammer." The apprentice did precisely what he thought he was told. Next day he was the village blacksmith.

• "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.

• "What is the secret of your serenity?
  Said the Master "Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable."

• Wisdom can be learned. But it cannot be taught.

• "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."

• Some people write to make a living; others to share their insights or raise questions that will haunt their readers; others yet to understand their very souls. None of these will last. That distinction belongs to those who write only because if they did not write they would burst... These writers give expression to the divine — no matter what they write about.

• "What is the work of a Master?" said a solemn-faced visitor.
  "To teach people to laugh," said the Master gravely.

• The master never let a statement about God go unchallenged. All God statements were poetic or symbolic expressions of the Unknowable; people, however, foolishly took them as literal descriptions of the divine.

• The Master once referred to the Hindu notion that all creation is "leela" — God's play — and the universe is his playground. The aim of spirituality, he claimed, is to make all life play.
  This seemed too frivolous for a puritanical visitor. "Is their no room then for work?"
  "Of course there is. But work becomes spiritual only when it is transformed into play."

• "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.

• The master enjoined not austerity, but moderation. If we truly enjoyed things, he claimed, we would be spontaneously moderate. Asked why he was so opposed to ascetical practices, he replied, "Because they produce pleasure-haters who always become people-haters — rigid and cruel."

• 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.

• The best things in life cannot be willed into being.

• You can will an act of service but you cannot will love.

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

• 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.

• "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."

• 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."

• To find the kingdom is the easiest thing in the world but also the most difficult. Easy because it is all around you and within you, and all you have to do is reach out and take possession of it. Difficult because if you wish to possess the kingdom you may possess nothing else. That is, you must drop all inward leaning on any person or thing, withdrawing from them forever the power to thrill you, or excite you, or to give you a feeling of security or well-being. For this, you first need to see with unflinching clarity this simple and shattering truth: Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing, but absolutely nothing can make you happy. The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another. None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure that initially grows in intesity, then turns into pain if you lose them and into boredom if you keep them.

• ...the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story."

• All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I'm gone, I trust you will notice the river.