Anthony de Mello Quotes

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you're living in an illusion. There's something seriously wrong with you. You're not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? "He is to blame, she is to blame. She's got to change." No! The world's all right. The one who has to change is you.

Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

One can't even know what it means to be lost in reality. For instance, it is easy to know whether you are lost or not in the Sahara desert, but to be lost in reality! This is much more complex!

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.

I myself am an absolute abyss.

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

Within me is the potential to commit every evil act I see being committed by other men, and unless I feel this potential, I can at any moment be controlled by these same urges. I am free from these urges only if I recognize when I am feeling them, and while feeling them and acknowledging them to be me, choose not to follow them. Only in this way can I begin to regain the disowned parts of me. And only in this way can I know what it is I am criticizing in others.

By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.

Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the way I want to behave or do behave.

To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.

I am myself. That is not enough.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.

I never asked to be born in the first place.

We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.

Watching Life on Mars was quite frightening for me because dipping in and out of reality was quite like myself

Being in the ring became my reality, and, in my reality, I'd think I was someone special.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.