Anthony de Mello 🗣️ “A good way to discover your shortcomings,” said the Master, “is to observe what irritates you in others.” "Live your life as you see fit. That's not selfish. Selfish is to demand that others live their lives as you see fit." "Seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth." "If people want happiness so badly, why don’t they attempt to understand their false beliefs? First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed." “As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning." “People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.” “The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment. The uprooting of sorrow means the uprooting, the dropping of attachments.” "Sinners often speak the truth. And saints have led people astray. Examine what is said, not the one who says it." “Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.” “All I can do for you is help you to unlearn. That’s what learning is all about where spirituality is concerned: unlearning, unlearning almost everything you’ve been taught. A willingness to unlearn, to listen.” “Think of a flabby person covered with fat. That is what your mind can become—flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover. It loses its alertness, its aliveness, its flexibility and goes to sleep. What are these layers? Every belief that you hold, every conclusion you have reached about persons and things, every habit and every attachment. In your formative years you should have been helped to scrape off these layers and liberate your mind. Instead your society, your culture, which put these layers on your mind in the first place, has educated you to not even notice them, to go to sleep and let other people—the experts: your politicians, your cultural and religious leaders—do your thinking for you. So you are weighed down with the load of unexamined, unquestioned authority and tradition.” “When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.” “Of what use is it to be tolerant of others if you are convinced that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong? That isn’t tolerance but condescension.” “To be properly wicked, you do not have to break the Law. Just observe it to the letter.” “Certainty is the culprit. The spiritual person knows uncertainty—a state of mind unknown to the religious fanatic.” “Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.” “The neurotic is a person who worries about something that did not happen in the past. He’s not like us normal people who worry about things that will not happen in the future.” “You listen,” said the Master, “not to discover, but to find something that confirms your own thoughts. You argue, not to find the truth, but to vindicate your thinking.” "Another illusion is that external events have the power to hurt you, that other people have the power to hurt you. They don't. It's you who give this power to them." "Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable." “If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone.”