Anthony de Mello Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.”

“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.”

“The world is right because I feel good.”

“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”

“We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause – for what they call success.

Those are words that do not correspond to reality. They are conventions, things that are invented, but we don't realize that they don't correspond to reality.

What is success? It is what one group decided is a good thing. Another group will decide the same thing is bad.”

“You’re never so centered on yourself as when you’re depressed.”

“A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by reality.”

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

“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.”

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

“When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.”

“When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.”

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

“Do not speak unless you can improve on the silence.”

“There was an exhausted woodcutter who kept wasting time and energy chopping wood with a blunt ax because he did not have the time, he said, to stop and sharpen the blade.”

“To be properly wicked, you do not have to break the law. Just observe it to the letter.”

“The greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.”

“Because left to its own devices life would never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to wearisomeness and boredom. Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom.

All of this mixed with the anxieties, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the sorrow, the pain, that make the cycle a roller coaster. When you have gone repeatedly around and around the cycle, a time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the whole process.

And if you are lucky enough not to run into something or someone else that catches your eye, you will have at least attained a fragile peace. That is the most that life can give you; and you can mistakenly equate this state with freedom and you die without ever having known what it means to be really free and to love.”

“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.”

“Of what use is it to be tolerant of others if you are convinced that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong? That isn’t tolerance but condescension.”

“The secret is to renounce nothing, cling to nothing, enjoy everything and allow it to pass, to flow.”

“You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not.

How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.”

“A story is the shortest distance between a human being and truth.”