Anthony de Mello Quotes

Desire disappears as you become more and more aware. When awareness is one hundred percent, there is no desire at all.

To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever

The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

The Buddha is in me, the Buddha is in you. Live up to it.

One has to go beyond the mind to experience the spiritual bliss of desirelessness.

To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.

Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.

Work done for the Self gives no bondage. Neither desire pleasure nor fear pain from work. It is the mind and body that work, not I. Tell yourself this unceasingly and realise it. Try not to know that you work.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery, caught in the desire, you see only the manifestations.

If you try too much to change the outside, that shows that you are still attached. If a man tries to be detached, it shows attachment. Why bother about detachment if you are not attached? If a man escapes from women, it shows that sex is still the obsession. Otherwise, why escape from women if you are not obsessed?

So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

The Sage has no thinking mind and therefore there are no ‘others’ for him.

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion's roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

I'm not speaking as someone who has reached satori or anything else. I'm a student.

The deeper you get into Yoga you realize it is a spiritual practice. It's a journey I'm making. I'm heading that way.

That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.