An attachment is not a fact. It is a belief, a fantasy, in your head, acquired through programming. If that fantasy did not exist inside your head, you would not be attached. You would love things and people, and you would enjoy them thoroughly, but on a nonattachment basis. As a matter of fact, is there any other way to really enjoy something?

— Anthony de Mello

Anthony de Mello Quotes

When you see this you will understand how people attempt to gain the world and, in the process, lose their soul.

— Anthony de Mello

If there is anything I can do about the future, right now, I shall do it. Then I’m going to just leave it alone and settle down to enjoy the present moment, because all the experience of my life has shown me that I can only cope with things when they are present, not before they occur. And that the present always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.

— Anthony de Mello

Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: first your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears.

— Anthony de Mello

The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now to where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition, for all you do is see for the first time what you have always been looking at. Who ever heard of a path that brings you to yourself or a method that makes you what you have always been? Spirituality, after all, is only a matter of becoming what you really are.

— Anthony de Mello

So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other.

— Anthony de Mello

The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. There is far too much God talk; the world is sick of it. There is too little awareness, too little love, too little happiness, but let’s not use those words either. There’s too little dropping of illusions, dropping of errors, dropping of attachments and cruelty, too little awareness. That’s what the world is suffering from, not from a lack of religion.

— Anthony de Mello

Your life as it is now: nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself you cannot be happy without: nightmare.

— Anthony de Mello

All revelations, however divine, are never any more than a finger pointing to the moon. As we say in the East, “When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger.

— Anthony de Mello

Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed by society to be unhappy, and so, no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail? Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they have been.

— 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. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself, and you begin to understand yourself.

— Anthony de Mello

The moment you choose to become like someone else however great or holy, you have prostituted your being.

— Anthony de Mello

For in the death of the ego is freedom, peace, serenity, joy.

— Anthony de Mello

The moment you say so-and-so is wise or is cruel or defensive or loving or whatever, you have hardened your perception and become prejudiced and ceased to perceive this person moment by moment, somewhat like a pilot who operates today with last week’s weather report.

— Anthony de Mello

Take a look at the society we live in. It is rotten to the core, infected with attachments. What is an attachment? An attachment is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.

— Anthony de Mello

When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

— Anthony de Mello

If you aren’t consciously aware, you’re vulnerable to either being brainwashed or being influenced by forces within you that you have no awareness of at all.

— Anthony de Mello

To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already.

— Anthony de Mello

An attachment, by its very nature, makes you vulnerable to emotional turmoil and is always threatening to shatter your peace.

— Anthony de Mello

To come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons and to be utterly alone.

— Anthony de Mello

An attachment is not a fact. It is a belief, a fantasy, in your head, acquired through programming. If that fantasy did not exist inside your head, you would not be attached. You would love things and people, and you would enjoy them thoroughly, but on a nonattachment basis. As a matter of fact, is there any other way to really enjoy something?

— Anthony de Mello
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