The Way to Love Quotes

“You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“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.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“Because left to its own devices life would never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to wearisomeness and boredom. Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom. All of this mixed with the anxieties, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the sorrow, the pain, that make the cycle a roller coaster. When you have gone repeatedly around and around the cycle, a time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the whole process. And if you are lucky enough not to run into something or someone else that catches your eye, you will have at least attained a fragile peace. That is the most that life can give you; and you can mistakenly equate this state with freedom and you die without ever having known what it means to be really free and to love.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“The secret is to renounce nothing, cling to nothing, enjoy everything and allow it to pass, to flow.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“I leave you free to be yourself: to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“For to love persons is to have died to the need for persons and to be utterly alone.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. As well”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“See how you attempt to bring about change—both in yourself and in others—through the use of punishment and reward, through discipline and control, through sermonizing and guilt, through greed and pride, ambition and vanity, rather than through loving acceptance and patience, painstaking understanding and vigilant awareness.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“If you ever allow yourself to see it will be the death of you. And that is why love is so terrifying, for to love is to see and to see is to die. But it is the most delightful exhilarating experience in the whole world. For in the death of the ego is freedom, peace, serenity, joy.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily. Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see the marvelous change that comes about in you. Once you have understood this truth and thereby stopped your computer from generating negative emotions you may take any action you deem fit. You may avoid the situation or the person; or you may try to change them; or you may insist on your rights or the rights of others being respected; you may even resort to the use of force. But only after you have got rid of your emotional upsets, for then your action will spring from peace and love, not from the neurotic desire to appease your computer or to conform to its programming or to get rid of the negative emotions it generates. Then you will understand how profound is the wisdom of the words: “If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. If a man in authority makes you go one mile, go with him two.” For it will have become evident to you that real oppression comes, not from people who fight you in court or from authority that subjects you to slave labor, but from your computer whose programming destroys your peace of mind the moment outside circumstances fail to conform to its demands. People have been known to be happy even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp! It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them. Otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire, not as he or she is in themselves.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“Hardly anyone has been told the following truth: In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get deprogrammed, get rid of those attachments.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“The consequence of all this is terrifying and inescapable: You have become incapable of loving anyone or anything. If you wish to love you must learn to see again. And if you wish to see you must give up your drug. You must tear away from your being the roots of society that have penetrated to the marrow. You must drop out. Externally everything will go on as before, you will continue to be in the world, but no longer of it. And in your heart you will now be free at last and utterly alone. It is only in this aloneness, this utter solitude, that dependence and desire will die, and the capacity to love is born. For one no longer sees others as means to satisfy one’s addiction.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“If you wish to attain to lasting happiness you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. How? Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“And you will understand how true it is that everyone who stops clinging to brothers or sisters, father, mother or children, land or houses … is repaid a hundred times over and gains eternal life.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“The moment you choose to become like someone else however great or holy, you have prostituted your being.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: first your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“You falsely think that your fears protect you, your beliefs have made you what you are and your attachments make your life exciting and secure. You fail to see that they are actually a screen between you and life’s symphony.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get deprogrammed, get rid of those attachments.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“If there is anything I can do about the future, right now, I shall do it. Then I’m going to just leave it alone and settle down to enjoy the present moment, because all the experience of my life has shown me that I can only cope with things when they are present, not before they occur. And that the present always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“When you go out to the world because of the love that someone else has for you, you are all aglow not with your perception of reality but with the love that you have received from someone else; someone else controls the switch and when it is switched off the glow fades away.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“of yourself and of other people. If you wish to attain to lasting happiness you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. How? Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness. So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“Now the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness—it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness; and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment. You will say, “Can’t I keep just one attachment?” Of course. You can keep as many as you want. But for each attachment you pay a price in lost happiness. Think of this: The nature of attachments is such, that even if you satisfy many of them in the course of a single day, the one attachment that was not satisfied will prey upon your mind and make you unhappy. There”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“If you wish to understand this, think of a little child that is given a taste for drugs. As the drug penetrates the body of the child, it becomes addicted and its whole being cries out for the drug. To be without the drug is so unbearable a torment that it seems preferable to die. Now this is exactly what society did to you when you were a child. You were not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life: work and play and the company of people and the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drug called Approval, Appreciation, Attention, the drug called Success, Prestige, Power. Having”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

“There is another way besides laborious self-punishment on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. This is far from easy because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“When you see this you will understand how people attempt to gain the world and, in the process, lose their soul.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: Meditations for Life