Anthony de Mello 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.'
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The Master persistently warned against the attempt to encompass Reality in a concept or a name. A scholar in mysticism once asked, 'When you speak of BEING, sir, is it eternal, transcendent being you speak of, or transient, contingent being?' The Master closed his eyes in thought. Then he opened them, put on his most disarming expression, and said, 'Yes!'
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The Master is not concerned with what we believe - only with what we see.
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When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.
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Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all - they are attempting nothing new.
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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.
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'Help us to find God.' 'No one can help you there.' 'Why not?' 'For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean.'
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The master made it his task to systematically destroy every doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now taken as descriptions. He loved to quote the Eastern saying: 'When the sage points at the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.'
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Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism.
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A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.
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Look for competence not claims.
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When I speak, you must not listen to the words, my dear. Listen to the Silence.
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The feigning sleeper can delude others - he cannot delude himself. The false mystic, unfortunately, can delude both others and himself.
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I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be I'm an Ass, You're an Ass. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, 'You're wrong' I say, 'What can you expect of an ass?'
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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.
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'You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone.' 'What then is a Master for?' 'To make you see the uselessness of having one.'
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Ideas kill people.
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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.'
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The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu's dictum: Those who know do not say; Those who say do not know. When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the master, 'Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?' All of them indicated that they knew. Then he said, 'put it into words.' All of them were silent.
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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.'
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The Master would frequently assert that holiness was less a matter of what one did than of what one allowed to happen.
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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.'
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No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.
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The master was never impressed by diplomas or degrees. He scrutinized the person, not the certificate. He was once heard to say, 'When you have ears to hear a bird in song, you don't need to look at its credentials.'