This is a curated selection of Anthony de Mello quotes (personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Anthony de Mello’s books (Amazon).
“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
- Seeing & Truth Quotes
- Spirituality & God Quotes
25 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
“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
“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
“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
Anthony de Mello Quotes on Programming & Conditioning
“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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
“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.” — 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.” — 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? … 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
“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
“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
“We always have to be on alert to see that religion doesn’t come in the way of truth.” — Anthony de Mello
“When the mind is unobstructed, the result is truth.” — 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
“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 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 … If you want to get to God, realize that your ideas of God are all inadequate … God is a mystery…unknowable, unintelligible, beyond the mind.” — 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
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