Anthony de Mello - Master Quotes

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"Why is everyone here so happy except me?"
"Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere," said the Master.
"Why don't I see goodness and beauty everywhere?"
"Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside."

Anthony de Mello
A disciple, in his reverence for the Master, looked upon him as God incarnate.
"Tell me, O Master," he said, "why you have come into this world."
"To teach fools like you to stop wasting their time worshiping Masters."

Anthony de Mello
The Master is not concerned with what we believe — only with what we see.

Anthony de Mello
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."

Anthony de Mello
The Master would insist that the final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept "God."

Anthony de Mello
You are so proud of your intelligence," said the master. "You are like a like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.

Anthony de Mello
When God means you to be a healer he sends you patients; when he makes you a teacher he sends you pupils; when he destines you to be a Master he sends you stories.

Anthony de Mello
"When you speak about Reality," said the Master, "you are attempting to put the Inexpressible into words, so your words are certain to be misunderstood. Thus people who read that expression of Reality called the Scriptures become stupid and cruel for they follow, not their common sense, but what they think their Scriptures say."
He had the perfect parable to show this: A village blacksmith found an apprentice willing to work hard at low pay. The smith immediately began his instructions to the lad: "When I take the metal out of the fire, I'll lay it on the anvil; and when I nod my head you hit it with the hammer." The apprentice did precisely what he thought he was told. Next day he was the village blacksmith.

Anthony de Mello
A disciple said to him, "I am ready, in the quest for God, to give up anything: wealth, friends, family, country, life itself. What else can a person give up?"
The Master calmly replied, "One's beliefs about God."

Anthony de Mello
"Name one practical, down-to-earth effect of spirituality," said the skeptic who was ready for an argument.
"Here's one," said the Master. "When someone offends you, you can raise your spirits to heights where offenses cannot reach."

Anthony de Mello
A zealous disciple expressed a desire to teach others the Truth and asked the Master what he thought about this. The Master said, "Wait."
Each year the disciple would return with the same request and each time the Master would give him the same reply: "Wait."
One day he said to the Master, "When will I be ready to teach?"
Said the Master, "When your excessive eagerness to teach has left you."

Anthony de Mello
A disciple was one day recalling how Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed were branded as rebels and heretics by their contemporaries.
Said the Master, Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy.

Anthony de Mello
The Master in these tales is not a single person. He is a Hindu Guru, a Zen Roshi, a Taoist Sage, a Jewish Rabbi, a Christian Monk, a Sufi Mystic. He is Lao-tzu and Socrates; Buddha and Jesus; Zarathustra and Mohammed. His teaching is found in the seventh century B. C. and the twentieth century A. D. His wisdom belongs to East and West alike. Do his historical antecedents really matter? History, after all, is the record of appearances, not Reality; of doctrines, not of Silence.

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
"I seek the meaning of existence." said the stranger.
"You are of course, assuming." said the Master, "that existence has a meaning."
"Doesn't it?"
"When you experience existence as it is — not as you think it is — you will discover that your question has no meaning."

Anthony de Mello
The Master once referred to the Hindu notion that all creation is "leela" — God's play — and the universe is his playground. The aim of spirituality, he claimed, is to make all life play.
This seemed too frivolous for a puritanical visitor. "Is their no room then for work?"
"Of course there is. But work becomes spiritual only when it is transformed into play."

Anthony de Mello
The Master would frequently assert that holiness was less a matter of what one did than of what one allowed to happen.

Anthony de Mello
A disciple asked, "Who is a Master?"
The Master replied, "Anyone to whom it is given to let go of the ego. Such a person's life is then a masterpiece."

Anthony de Mello
Isn't there such a thing as social liberation?"
"Of course there is," said the Master.
"How would you describe it?"
"Liberation from the need to belong to the herd."

Anthony de Mello
The master never let a statement about God go unchallenged. All God statements were poetic or symbolic expressions of the Unknowable; people, however, foolishly took them as literal descriptions of the divine.

Anthony de Mello
Said the self-righteous preacher, "What, in your judgment, is the greatest sin in the world?"
"That of the person who sees other human beings as sinners," said the Master.

Anthony de Mello