This page lists some of the all-time best Anthony de Mello quotes. Enjoy!
You may also enjoy my Anthony de Mello book summaries of Awareness (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary) and The Way to Love (Book Summary).
“Maybe in the course of all my talking, one or another of you will have looked and seen through all this network of lies, and conditionings, and programming that we’ve been subjected to and had some inkling into who they are.” — Anthony de Mello
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Upset Quotes
- Programming & Conditioning Quotes
- Awareness & Self-Inquiry Quotes
- Love & Happiness Quotes
- Seeing & Truth Quotes
- Spirituality & God Quotes
50+ Anthony de Mello Quotes on Programming, Awareness, Love, & More
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Suffering & Upset
“Are you suffering? Do you have problems? Could it be said of you that you’re not enjoying every single minute of your life? … If the answer is you are suffering and you do have problems, there’s something wrong with you—seriously wrong. You’re asleep. You’re dead!” — Anthony de Mello
“Are you upset and disturbed? Do you have problems? Are you not enjoying life? Never doubt it, you’re fast asleep!” — Anthony de Mello
“It isn’t life that is hard on you; it is you who take it hard.” — Anthony de Mello
“Life is a banquet, but most people are starving.” — Anthony de Mello
“The present moment is never intolerable.” — Anthony de Mello
“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.” — Anthony de Mello
“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.” — Anthony de Mello
“As long as I’ve got an enemy out there who’s upsetting me, I’m demanding that that change. I’m refusing to give up my upset unless that thing changed.” — Anthony de Mello
“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.” — Anthony de Mello
“The human mind is such an extraordinary thing. It has invented the computer. It has split the atom. It sends ships into space. It has not solved the problem of human suffering … How come we haven’t found the answer to that? We’ve made all kinds of technological advances. Has that raised the quality of our living by one inch? My opinion is no, not one inch. Oh, we have more comfort, more speed, pleasures, entertainment—greater technological advances. Any improvement on that loneliness and emptiness and heartache? Any improvement on that greed and hatred and conflict? Less fighting? Less cruelty? If you want my opinion, I think it’s worse. And, the tragedy is, the secret has been found.” — Anthony de Mello
“When you’re upset, your telescope is out of focus. When you’re upset, your window is blurred. And, the fool that you are, you’re going now to straighten out all the buildings because your window is blurred with the rain. You’ve got to straighten out the buildings. Could we clean your window first? Then we’ll know what needs to be done and what doesn’t need to be done.” — Anthony de Mello
“The big American question: how do we fix it? He’s not upsetting me, I’m not upsetting me, the programming is upsetting me. How do I fix this? You know the big Oriental answer? You don’t fix it, you let it be, it’ll go away. The more you try to fix it, the stronger it gets.” — Anthony de Mello
“There’s an assumption that if you don’t upset yourself, if you don’t train people to upset themselves, they’re not going to do anything … Lots of people cannot even conceive of their swinging into action without their first upsetting themselves.” — Anthony de Mello
“The people who programmed us feared that if we didn’t upset ourselves we wouldn’t do anything. It never occurred to them to realize that when you upset yourself you have less energy to do something and you have less perception; you’re not seeing things right anymore, you’re overreacting.” — Anthony de Mello
“Think of something that till now you would have said has upset you. Understand that it wasn’t that thing or that person that upset you, it was your programming.” — Anthony de Mello
“When something happens that we commonly say upsets you, it isn’t this thing that upsets you. Life is not rough on you, life is easy—it’s your programming that is rough on you … It isn’t this thing outside there that’s causing the upset, it isn’t you that are causing the upset, it’s your programming.” — Anthony de Mello
“No one has ever hurt you in the whole of your life. No event has ever upset you. This was done by you. In fact, it wasn’t even done by you because we wouldn’t do this deliberately. It was done by your conditioning, by your programming, by the way you looked at things and at life. That’s what needs to be changed: the change of mind.” — Anthony de Mello
“If people are bugging or upsetting you, this is a glorious opportunity to understand yourself, to understand your programming—to realize that the upset is coming not from them, but from your programming.” — Anthony de Mello
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Programming & Conditioning
More here: The Societal Drug keeping You a Sleeping Robot (Anthony de Mello Excerpt)
“Would any of you in your right mind sit down and knowingly, and willingly, and deliberately upset yourselves? It’s as if this is something beyond our control. So, stop blaming yourself. This has been stamped into you, you’ve been programmed into this, you’ve been conditioned this way. This is what you got to understand. You see, you don’t have to do anything for enlightenment, you don’t have to do anything for liberation—and for spirituality all you have to do is to see something, understand something. If you would understand it, you’d be free.” — Anthony de Mello
“Who is responsible for the programming? Not you. It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and so-called needs; your values, your tastes, your attitudes.” — Anthony de Mello
“One must take responsibility wisely … It’s no maturity to blame yourself when you’re not to blame. You’re not doing it deliberately. This comes from your programming. You’re not blaming your programming, you’re understanding it … When you bump into reality, there’s a pain caused within you. That pain is not caused by reality, but something that’s happening inside of you. You’re not producing that deliberately. Who would deliberately want to cause pain to themselves? Now you have to understand what that something is. Why is it with some people this process doesn’t go on or they’ve released themselves from it, whereas with others it does? This is responsibility—to understand. And, as a result of understanding, to be freed from it.” — Anthony de Mello
“Maturity is when you no longer blame anyone. You don’t blame others; you don’t blame yourself. You see what’s wrong, and you set about remedying it … Maturity is to understand that no one is to blame, or better still more accurately put, not to give yourself the childish emotional outlet of blaming others or yourself but rather seeing what went wrong and setting about remedying it. They’re not to blame, you’re not to blame; it’s the programming that’s doing this to you.” — Anthony de Mello
“The more you understand human nature, the less inclined you feel to judge anyone because there’s so much stupidity, so much ignorance, so much fear, and so much programming behind so much of what we call ‘sin’ that we’ve been rightly advised to judge no one, not even ourselves.” — Anthony de Mello
“You want to see what kind of a robot existence human beings live? Listen to this. You’ve got the robot who comes here, and I say, ‘My you’re looking pretty!,’ and the robot goes right up. I press a button called ‘appreciation,’ and right up it goes. Then I press another button called ‘criticism’—flat on the earth. Total control. We’re so affected by this, we’re so easily controlled by it. And, when we’re deprived of it, we become so terrified. We’re so frightened to make mistakes. We’re so frightened that people will laugh at us … ‘I like you,’ and the robot will automatically, mechanically react, ‘Oh, he’s good, he likes me.’ ‘I don’t like you,’ (and the robot will automatically, mechanically react) ‘He’s awful, he doesn’t like me.’” — Anthony de Mello
“Think of a little child. It’s given a taste for drugs. As it grows up, the whole body of that child is craving for the drug. To live without the drug brings a pain and a suffering so great that it seems preferable to die. You and I, as children, were given a drug: it was called ‘approval,’ it was called ‘appreciation,’ it was called ‘praise,’ ‘success,’ ‘acceptance,’ ‘popularity.’ Once you took the drug, society could control you. The tentacles of society got into you.” — Anthony de Mello
“As a result of having taken this drug, you have lost your ability to love. You know why? Because you cannot see any human being anymore. You’re so conscious of whether they accept you or they don’t, whether they approve of you or they don’t. You’re seeing them as a threat to your drug or as a support to your drug. The politician frequently doesn’t see people at all; he sees votes. And, if you’re neither a threat nor a support to his getting votes, he doesn’t even notice you. The businessman sees big bucks; he doesn’t see people, he sees business deals. But, we’re no different if we’re under the effect of this drug … How can you love what you do not even see?” — Anthony de Mello
“You want to get rid of the drug? You have to tear those tentacles out of your system … by seeing what they are doing to you. If you’re able to do that, everything will be the same, but you will have dropped out. You will be in the world, but you will no longer be of the world.” — Anthony de Mello
“Do you think Jesus Christ was controlled by this kind of thing? By what people thought of him and what they said about him? Awake people break out of this drug.” — Anthony de Mello
“Do you see now how you are in a prison created by the beliefs and traditions of your society and culture and by the ideas, prejudices, attachments and fears of your past experiences?” — Anthony de Mello
“‘You are so proud of your intelligence,’ said the master. ‘You are like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.'” — Anthony de Mello
“Being an American is only in your head. There are no American trees or American mountains. This is a convention that people are ready to die for that’s how real it looks to them.” — Anthony de Mello
“Think of your own life: is there a single day when you’re not consciously or unconsciously attuned to what others think, what others feel, and what they will say about you—in other words, controlled by them, marching to the beat of their drum?” — Anthony de Mello
“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.” — Anthony de Mello
“We’re all in the change business aren’t we? We want to change ourselves, we want to change the world. That’s what our stupid programming has done to us. You got to change everything without first understanding anything. What you need is not change; you need understanding. Understand yourself. Understand others … You’re not here to change the world, you’re here to love the world.” — Anthony de Mello
“If you would face the loneliness, you might discover that it isn’t there. There is no emptiness. If you would face the illusion that you were programmed into by your society, that you need others, you’d realize it isn’t there.” — Anthony de Mello
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Awareness & Self-Inquiry
“The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: ‘Who am I?’ Or rather: ‘What is ‘I’?’ What is this thing I call ‘I’? What is this thing I call self? You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this? You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know who you are? My, you are still asleep. You are a sleeping scientist.” — Anthony de Mello
“You could have a lot of learning and no awareness of yourself at all. You could know how spaceships function and not how you yourself function. What is needed is not an educational background but wisdom, understanding, intelligence, which is acquired by cutting, scraping, melting, questioning, doubting. If you never question, if you never doubt, what they taught you, what your culture gave you, how would you understand all of this?” — Anthony de Mello
“Get on with self-observation, self-awareness, self-understanding, self-liberation—then you will understand better.” — Anthony de Mello
“Not even the greatest guru in the world can take a single step for you … It is you who have to digest your food, it is you who have to understand … It is you who have to seek … And if what you seek is truth, then you must do this.” — Anthony de Mello
“As you identify less and less with the ‘I,’ you will be more at ease with everybody … 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?” — Anthony de Mello
“To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were … You thought you were the dancer; you now experience yourself as the dance.” — Anthony de Mello
“Both what you’re running away from and what you’re searching for is inside of you. It’s all there. If you would face what’s going on inside of you, what you’re running away from would disappear, and what you’re searching for would emerge.” — Anthony de Mello
“The enemies to freedom are not outside of us.” — Anthony de Mello
Monk: “All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars – where do they come from?” Master: “Where does your question come from?” — Anthony de Mello
“Do you have a need to give yourself the good feeling that you’re converting everybody and the cause of their enlightenment? Maybe you ought to look into yourself now. You’re not going to be happy unless you set yourself up as the great master?” — Anthony de Mello
“The day you stop rushing, you will arrive.” — Anthony de Mello
“The thing to be intoxicated on is life.” — Anthony de Mello
“What does it mean to be really alive? It means to be you, to be now, and to be here.” — Anthony de Mello
“The greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.” — Anthony de Mello
“Life is something that happens to us while we’re busy at something else. We’re busy trying to impress everyone, we’re busy trying to look good, we’re busy trying to win the Olympics, we’re busy trying to succeed—and life passes us by.” — Anthony de Mello
“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…That’s the difference.” — Anthony de Mello
“Awareness, awareness, awareness! In awareness is healing; in awareness is truth; in awareness is salvation; in awareness is spirituality, in awareness is growth; in awareness is love; in awareness is awakening. Awareness.” — Anthony de Mello
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Love & Happiness
“They say love is blind. Rubbish! There’s nothing so clear-sighted as love. Attachment is blind because it’s based on a false belief.” — Anthony de Mello
“Attachment is a false belief—the false belief that any thing or person can make you happy.” — Anthony de Mello
“Once these illusions drop, the heart will be unobstructed—then there will be love, then there will be happiness, then there will be transformation, and only then will you know what God is.” — Anthony de Mello
“You cannot do anything to get love. If you would understand your desires, attachments, attractions, obsessions, addictions, and they would drop, love would emerge. When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.” — Anthony de Mello
“True happiness is caused by nothing. True happiness is uncaused. If you ask the mystic why he or she is happy, the answer will be, ‘Why not?’ No block, no obstruction.” — Anthony de Mello
“When nothing can hurt you—no event, no person, no thing—you’re happy. What do you do to be happy? Nothing. You don’t do anything, you drop something—you drop an illusion, you drop a wrong idea. How do you drop it? By seeing that it is wrong.” — Anthony de Mello
“Nothing in all of this world has the power to upset you. Nothing.” — Anthony de Mello
“It is impossible to be grateful and unhappy.” — Anthony de Mello
“The rediscovery of life: you will never live till you stop clinging to life. Let go. When you cling, happiness dies.” — Anthony de Mello
“As long as your happiness is caused or sustained by something or someone outside of you, you are still in the land of the dead.” — Anthony de Mello
“There are two types of desires: 1) there’s the desire on whose fulfillment our happiness depends, and 2) there’s the desire on whose fulfillment our happiness does not depend.” — Anthony de Mello
“Your unhappiness is caused by something that you have added; that addition causes unhappiness. How do you become healthy? Drop your sickness, and you’re healthy. You don’t acquire health. Health isn’t something, it’s the absence of sickness.” — Anthony de Mello
“It shows how bad your theological education has been that you think you’ve got to do something to be happy.” — Anthony de Mello
“Ask to be happy no matter what you get. There is the secret.” — Anthony de Mello
“The secret is to renounce nothing, cling to nothing, enjoy everything and allow it to pass, to flow.” — Anthony de Mello
“‘What is the secret of your serenity?’ Said the Master, ‘Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable.’” — Anthony de Mello
“I’ll understand where you’re coming from. I’ll be compassionate towards you. But, someday, sometime, somewhere, if you’re ready, I’ll slip you the secret. That to me would be true compassion. You don’t have to be this way; there’s another way.” — Anthony de Mello
“There’s only one need: to be real, to love. When one discovers that, one is transformed.” — Anthony de Mello
“What it means to love is to see. How can you love what you don’t even see?” — Anthony de Mello
“You want to love people? You have to die to people; you have to die to your need for people … Aloneness is not the same as loneliness. Loneliness means missing people. Aloneness means not needing anyone; enjoying people, but not needing them. Then, at last, you can see them … As long as I need you, I cannot love you. As long as I need you for my happiness, I cannot love you … Loneliness is not cured by human contact, by contact with human beings; it is cured by contact with reality.” — Anthony de Mello
“I cannot tell you what love is, it cannot be said. I cannot tell you what happiness is, it cannot be said. When you drop your fears, and your attachments, and your illusions, you will know. I could give you comparisons. To love means at least: clarity of perception, and accuracy of response. I see you clearly as you are. That’s the least I could demand in love. How could I love you if I don’t see you? … I see you in present moment freshness, and I react to what’s here … When you perceive clearly, you really cannot but respond accurately because clarity of perception means you’ve dropped whatever obstacles there are to seeing. That seeing is love. You will spontaneously give to each thing the response it deserves.” — Anthony de Mello
“Love is not blaming others, love is not judging others, love is not condemning others—love is understanding. Can you understand where they came from? Can you understand how there’s so little malice there, and so much ignorance, and so much goodwill, and so much helplessness, and so much programming, and so much confusion, and so much fear? Have you ever paused to understand this? Then you’ll understand what it means to love.” — Anthony de Mello
“To talk of prayer is to talk of love—for God is love, love is divine.” — Anthony de Mello
“Love is not a relationship; love is a state of being.” — Anthony de Mello
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Seeing & Truth
“The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take?” — Anthony de Mello
“How could you go about creating a happy, loving, peaceful world? By learning a simple, beautiful, but painful art called the art of looking.” — Anthony de Mello
“You’ve got a thin veneer of culture that’s different, but deep down we’re all the same. Same problems everywhere: the hatred is the same, the conflict is the same, the guilt is the same, the dependence on people’s opinion and on the emotional dependence on approval is the same. It’s exactly the same, just scrape off the exterior culture … You don’t change it, you understand it, you look at it, you observe it. It’ll take care of itself. Then what happens is you don’t change it, life changes it, nature changes it.” — Anthony de Mello
“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.” — Anthony de Mello
“Observe the marvelous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good and bad, as saints and sinners and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant.” — Anthony de Mello
“Do you want to change the world? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.” — Anthony de Mello
“For your being to be transformed, you need to see; to see something which will change you … You don’t have to do anything; you’ve got to see things in a new way … Literally another mind, another way of looking at things, another way of seeing everything. That’s the transformation we’re talking about.” — Anthony de Mello
“You need the willingness to think the unfamiliar, the willingness to see something new. And, that’s the last thing that most human beings want. They don’t want to see anything different from what from what they’ve been seeing all along.” — Anthony de Mello
“If you would see your illusions and your erroneous ideas, they will drop and you will change.” — Anthony de Mello
“You’re really seeing people not as they are, but as you are.” — Anthony de Mello
“When the mind is unobstructed, the result is truth.” — Anthony de Mello
“The moment that you dare to expose yourself to truth, you’re finished. If you glimpse it even once, something in you will be taking you back to it.” — Anthony de Mello
“A story is the shortest distance between a human being and truth.” — Anthony de Mello
“We always have to be on alert to see that religion doesn’t come in the way of truth.” — Anthony de Mello
“The best religion in the world is the religion called love, not the religion called ‘Lord, Lord’. Who says that? Jesus Christ himself.” — Anthony de Mello
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Spirituality & God
“Spirituality is to be awake, to drop your illusions. Spirituality is never to be at the mercy of any event, thing, or person. Spirituality is to have discovered those diamond mines inside of you. Religion is meant to lead you to this; alas, if you look at the world, it frequently doesn’t.” — Anthony de Mello
“Spirituality or religion means drop your illusions. Inasmuch as religion helps you to do this, it’s fine. Inasmuch as it distracts you from it, takes you away from it, it’s a disease, it’s a plague, it must be avoided.” — Anthony de Mello
“Things that before would have made you sick with anxiety or with suffering, you can take in your stride with perfect peace and you’re quite relaxed. That’s the spiritual life. That’s dying to yourself, dropping that programming. You drop it by understanding it for what it is. Call it by its name.” — Anthony de Mello
“There’s a mystic who says, ‘Human beings are born asleep, they live asleep, and they die asleep.’ But, that is so true! Maybe they’re not born asleep; they’re born awake. But, by the time they develop their brains, they fall asleep. And, they breed children in their sleep, they bring them up in their sleep, they go in for big business in their sleep, they go into government in their sleep, and they die in their sleep. They never wake up. That is what spirituality is all about: to wake up! You’re moving around in a drunken stupor. It’s as if you were hypnotized. You’re drugged. And, you don’t know what you’re missing.” — Anthony de Mello
“The form of prayer that is required is awareness … What is prayer? Prayer is fire; fire meaning transformation that comes about from seeing one’s illusions and dropping them.” — Anthony de Mello
“What good is it to you to study the scriptures and crucify the Messiah on the basis of them as Jesus was if you’ve not understood what it means to live, and to be free, and to be spiritual?” — Anthony de Mello
“Here we are scouring the earth, running everywhere in search of it; we had it right here at home and did not understand it. We listened to all kinds of sermons, and we studied all kinds of books, and we went to all kinds of churches, but we never heard it. We never recognized the Messiah. He was right there staring at us right under our nose, but we didn’t see it.” — Anthony de Mello
“The tragedy of the human race is not that there’s a shortage of God’s grace, it’s that there’s a shortage of proper understanding.” — Anthony de Mello
“God isn’t anything like the idea that you have of God.” — Anthony de Mello
“God is beyond the knowing mind which is why we call Him ‘mystery.’” — Anthony de Mello
“If you cannot describe a simple thing like the fragrance of a rose, how could anybody describe the experience of God?” — Anthony de Mello
“Can it be that God is staring us in the face, but because we are clinging to some ideas we fail to recognize Him?” — Anthony de Mello
“If you want to get to God, realize that your ideas of God are all inadequate. Lots of people are not ready to realize that, and that’s the big obstacle to prayer and to meditation.” — Anthony de Mello
”Any way to God has to be a way through silence. If you ever come to union with God, you must pass through silence.” — Anthony de Mello
“Silence means going beyond words and thoughts … God is nothing like what we say He is, and He is nothing like what we imagine or think He is … Most people will not accept this. They cling to their images of God, and that is the biggest obstacle to their getting to silence.” — Anthony de Mello
“Scripture doesn’t give us a picture of God, doesn’t give us a description of God, it gives us a direction. Because no words can give us a picture of God. In my country, India, let’s suppose I’m walking towards Bombay. And then I come to the signpost that says ‘Bombay’. And then I say, ‘Well, what do you know, here it is, Bombay!’ And I look at it, and go back. And people say to me, ‘Did you get to Bombay?’ I say, ‘Oh yes, I got to Bombay’. ‘What is it like?’ ‘You know, it’s like a board, painted yellow, and there are words on it, one looks like a ‘B’, one looks like…’ Do you see that? I missed the point because that signpost isn’t Bombay. In fact, it isn’t like Bombay at all, it isn’t a picture of Bombay—it’s a pointer. That is what scripture is—a pointer. In the East, we have a saying, ‘When the wise man points to the moon, all that the fool sees is the finger’. Imagine that I am pointing to the moon, and I say, ‘Moon’. And you come running up and say, ‘Oh, is this the moon?’ And you’re looking at the finger. This is the danger and the tragedy of words … God is a mystery … unknowable, unintelligible, beyond the mind … We use the words of scripture to go beyond the words and to attain silence.” — Anthony de Mello
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