Anthony de Mello - Live Quotes

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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.

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

Anthony de Mello
The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine you're lying in your coffin....Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn't it?

Anthony de Mello
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."

Anthony de Mello
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. So they are spared the guilt and anxiety that so torment human beings and they are full of the sheer joy of living, taking delight not so much in persons or things as in life itself. 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. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom.

Anthony de Mello
And increasingly - you know this and so do I we're losing the youth everywhere. They hate us; they are not interested in having more fears and guilt laid on them. They're not interested in more sermons and exhortations. But they are interested in learning about love. How can I be happy? How can I live? How can I taste the marvelous things that the mystics speak of?

Anthony de Mello
You're not living until it doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it.

Anthony de Mello
Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts - generally somebody else's - mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.

Anthony de Mello
People who deliberate fully before they take a step will spend their lives on one leg

Anthony de Mello