BY SOFO ARCHON
I’ve always loved quotes. In just a small sentence, one can transmit tremendously powerful insights that sometimes even long essays can’t.
Here I have collected for you 53 magnificent quotes from spiritual teacher and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello on topics such as life and death, god and truth, love and silence, wisdom and happiness.
May you learn and enjoy.
1. “The world is right because I feel good.”
2. “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.”
3. “Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”
4. “When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence.”
5. “Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.”
6. “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.”
7. “The day you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”
8. “You cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.”
9. “Obedience keeps the rules,” he would say. “Love knows when to break them.”
10. “The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two.”
11. “No one can help the fish to find the ocean.”
12. “Is there life before death? — that is the question!”
13. “Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.”
14. “When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.”
15. “Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.”
16. “Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?”
17. “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.”
18. “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.”
19. “Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.”
20. “The final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept ‘God’.”
21. “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.”
22. “Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy.”
23. “A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.”
24. “The feigning sleeper can delude others — he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself.”
25. “If you never condemned you would never need to forgive.”
26. “When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding… you can be yourself. Relaxed. You’ll no longer be driving with your brakes on.”
27. “People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.”
28, “The Master is not concerned with what we believe — only with what we see.”
29. “You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.”
30. “Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything.”
31. “That transformation is the consequence not of something done, but of something dropped.”
32. “The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being.”
33. “Eternal means timeless — no time.”
34. “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.”
35. “The end of the world for a caterpillar is a butterfly.”
36. “Don’t ask the world to change — you change first.”
37. “The best things in life cannot be willed into being.”
38. “One always treads with a joyful step when one has dropped the burden called the ego.”
39. “When you have ears to hear a bird in song, you don’t need to look at its credentials.”
40. “All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I’m gone, I trust you will notice the river.”
41. “Love is not something you have; love is something that has you.”
42. “No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.”
43. “You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story.”
44. “People kill for money or for power. But the most ruthless murderers are those who kill for their ideas.”
45. “The atheist makes the mistake of denying that of which nothing may be said… and the theist makes the mistake of affirming it.”
46. “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.”
47. “Wisdom can be learned. But it cannot be taught.”
48. “Problems only exist in the human mind.”
49. “Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
50. “Work becomes spiritual only when it is transformed into play.”
51. “To those who seek to protect their ego true Peace brings only disturbance.”
52. “Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all — they are attempting nothing new.”
53. “If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future.”