Anthony de Mello Quotes

Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.

You all know the saying which is very true: What you resist persists. And I'm sure many of you have already found that out in your life. And then suddenly when you let go of resistance you let go of an attachment to something: I need this to happen in order to be happy; I don't want what is, I want something else. To be okay with what is, which is the simplicity of this moment, is the beginning of true change.

The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition

The secret of happiness is renunciation.

How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier. Ambition means an ego trip: "I want to be this, I want to be that - more money, more power, more prestige."

You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something.

Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.

Life truly is a journey, and the less baggage we carry the easier the ride.

People always think that happiness is a faraway thing … something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up.

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.

What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.

Buddha says: Life should be simple, not complex. Life should be based on needs, not on desires. Needs are perfectly okay: you need food, you need clothes, you need a shelter, you need love, you need relationship. Perfectly good, nothing wrong in it. Needs can be fulfilled; desires are basically unfulfillable. Desires create complexity. They create complexity because they can never be fulfilled. You go on and on working hard for them, and they remain unfulfilled, and you remain empty.

The more things I threw away, the more I found.

It is not your passing thoughts or brilliant ideas so much as your plain everyday habits that control your life....Live simply. Don’t get caught in the machine of the world— it is too exacting. By the time you get what you are seeking your nerves are gone, the heart is damaged, and the bones are aching. Resolve to develop your spiritual powers more earnestly from now on. Learn the art of right living. If you have joy you have everything,so learn to be glad and contented....Have happiness now.

You don't have to have more in order to be happy.

Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

All you realy need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.

When we recognize that nothing has to go right for us to be happy, that people do not have to behave for us to love them, our walk home can be surprisingly simple. We have enormous power not to manipulate the world, but to be happy and to know peace.

It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.

As you identify less and less with the “me”, you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything. Do you know why? Because you are no longer afraid of being hurt or not liked. You no longer desire to impress anyone. Can you imagine the relief when you don't have to impress anybody anymore? Oh, what a relief. Happiness at last!

We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity.

You will never find happiness until you stop looking for it.

You don't need others to change in order to be happy.

Happiness is gentleness, peace, concentration, simplicity, forgiveness, humor, fearlessness, trust, and now.