The following are my favorite quotes from Anthony de Mello's Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality.
- Most people tell you that they want to get out of kindergarten, but don't believe them. Don't believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. "Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success." This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That's all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
- You are never in love with anyone. You're only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person. Take a minute to think about that: You are never in love with anyone, you're in love with your prejudiced idea of that person. Isn't that how you fall out of love? Your idea changes, doesn't it?
- You never trust anyone. You only trust your judgment about that person. So what are you complaining about? The fast is that you don't like to say, "My judgment was lousy." That's not very flattering to you, is it? So you prefer to say, "How could you have let me down?"
- It's only when you're sick of your sickness that you'll get out of it. Most people go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist to get relief. I repeat: to get relief. Not to get out of it.
- When you renounce something, you're stuck to it forever. When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it.
- Are you listening for what will confirm what you already think? Or are you listening in order to discover something new? That is important.
- You frequently interpret everything that's being said in terms of your hypnotic state or your conditioning or your programming.
- Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.
- The trouble with people is that they're busy fixing things they don't even understand. We're always fixing things, aren't we? It never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed. They really don't. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they'd change.
- The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: "Who am I?" Or rather: "What is 'I'?" What is this thing I call "I"? What is this thing I call self?
- When "I" does not identify with money, or name, or nationality, or person, or friends, or any quality, the "I" is never threatened.
- All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.
- 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.
- We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess. Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent.
- Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.
- Someone once said, "The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong." But these are the easiest things in the world if you haven't identified with the "me."
- Some say that there are only two things in the world: God and fear; love and fear are the only two things. There's only one evil in the world, fear. There's only one good in the world, love. It's sometimes called by other names. It's sometimes called happiness or freedom or peace or joy or God or whatever. But the label doesn't really matter. And there's not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to fear. Not one.
- Think of the last time you were angry and search for the fear behind it. What were you afraid of losing? What were you afraid would be taken from you? That's where the anger comes from.
- What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you're not aware of. When you're aware of it, you're free from it. It's there, but you're not affected by it. You're not controlled by it; you're not enslaved by it. That's the difference.
- Suffering points out that there is a falsehood somewhere. 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.
- The main preoccupation of society is to keep society sick! And the sooner you realize that, the better.
- The person who is asleep always things he'll feel better if somebody else changes. You're suffering because you are asleep, but you're thinking, "How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed."
- Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of "I"; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.
- Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as YOU see fit. That's selfish. It is not selfish to live your life as you see fit. The selfishness lies in demanding that someone else live their life to suit your tastes, or your pride, or your profit, or your pleasure. That is truly selfish.
- Someday you will understand that simply by awareness you have already attained what you were pushing yourself toward.
- 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.
- If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.
- My country was one country once upon a time; it's four now. If we don't watch out it might be six. Then we'll have six flags, six armies. That's why you'll never catch me saluting a flag. I abhor all national flags because they are idols. What are we saluting? I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it.
- The beauty of an action comes not from its having become a habit but from its sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception, and accuracy of response.
- The root of sorrow is craving.
- A terrorist to you is a martyr to the other side.
- Ideals do a lot of damage. The whole time you're focusing on what should be instead of focusing on what is.
- Freedom lies not in external circumstances; freedom resides in the heart.
- When you have enjoyed something intensely, you need very little.
- The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that you're lying in your coffin...dead. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn't it?
- Every child has a god in him; our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.
