Anthony de Mello Quotes

Obedience keeps the rules. Love knows when to break them.

I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.

There couldn't be better parents than mine, loving yet strict. They disciplined with love. A child without discipline is, in away, a lost child. You cannot have freedom without discipline.

It's about living in a world with rules, or a world without rules.

Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.

I never have been an anarchist, I've always had goals and always have acted out of love.

I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?

When a police officer tells you to stay in the car, you stay in the car.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love

For the first time in my life, I have to grab the monks by the throat. Me! The most religious man in the Kingdom! Because I've had enough- more than enough! My subjects and the elite among my subjects must obey!

I don't like rules, because rules, you have to follow.

The Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.

There must be a law if there is to be liberty. Try to play a piano and you will run into laws as fixed as the decrees of the Medes and Persians. But through those statutes you reach the songs, drudgery leads to delight. The law of Christ brings the liberty of Christ. Keep His statutes, and they become songs. The other side of commandment is conquest. What seems restraint to the outsider means release to you.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldn't be learning respect for authority, they'd be learning logic.

Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.

Discipline must be maintained.

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principle motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.

It is tougher for a dog to live without rules because he doesn't know what is expected of him. It is the mind, the body, the heart, not just the heart. Love is not enough.

God bless thee; and put meekness in thy breast, Love, charity, obedience, and true duty!

If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.

Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

Speak, Lord”; make time to listen. Chastening is more than a means of discipline, it is meant to get me to the place of saying, “Speak, Lord.”

To the table or to bed, you must come when you are bid.