Stop Fixing Yourself Quotes

“Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed by society to be unhappy, and so, no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail? Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they have been.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts—generally somebody else’s—mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself, and you begin to understand yourself.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“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. Second, because they are scared to lose the only world they know—the world of desires, attachments, fears, social pressures, tensions, ambitions, worries, and guilt with occasional flashes of pleasure and relief and excitement. It’s like someone that is afraid to let go of a nightmare because, after all, it is the only world he knows. There you have a picture of yourself and of other people.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“An attachment is not a fact. It is a belief, a fantasy, in your head, acquired through programming. If that fantasy did not exist inside your head, you would not be attached. You would love things and people, and you would enjoy them thoroughly, but on a nonattachment basis. As a matter of fact, is there any other way to really enjoy something?”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Take a look at the society we live in. It is rotten to the core, infected with attachments. What is an attachment? An attachment is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“It is a sobering thought that the finest act of love you can perform is not an act of service but an act of contemplation, of seeing.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“What, then, is happiness? Very few people know. No one can tell you because happiness cannot be described. Can you describe light to people who have been sitting in darkness all their lives? Can you describe reality to someone in a dream? Understand your darkness, and it will vanish. Then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is, and it will stop. Then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs, and they will drop. Then you will know the taste of happiness.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“If you get rid of your fear of failure and drop your tensions about succeeding, you will be yourself. You will be relaxed. You won’t be driving with your brakes on. That’s what would happen.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Thus, any change you achieve is inevitably accompanied by inner conflict.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing—but absolutely nothing of the world—can make you happy. The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend or lover to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another. None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure, that initially grows in intensity then turns into pain if you lose them and boredom if you keep them.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Compare the serene and simple splendor of a rose in bloom with the tensions and restlessness of your life. The rose has a gift that you lack: It is perfectly content to be itself. It has not been programmed from birth, as you have been, to be dissatisfied with itself, so it doesn’t have the slightest urge to be anything other than what it is. It possesses the artless grace and absence of inner conflict that among humans is only found in little children and mystics. Only the adult human being is able to be one thing and pretend to be another. Think of the sad history of your self-improvement efforts—they either ended in disaster or they succeeded only at the cost of struggle and pain. You are always dissatisfied with yourself, always wanting to change yourself, always wanting more. So, you are full of violence and self-intolerance, which only grows with every effort that you make to change yourself. Thus, any change you achieve is inevitably accompanied by inner conflict. Now suppose you stopped all efforts to change yourself and ended all self-dissatisfaction. Would you then be doomed to go to sleep at night having passively accepted everything in you and around you? There is another choice besides laborious self-pushing, on the one hand, or stagnant acceptance, on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. It 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, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Take a look at the people around you. Is there a single person among them who hasn’t become addicted to those worldly feelings? Is there a single person who is not controlled by them, hungering for them, spending every minute of their waking life consciously or unconsciously seeking them? When you see this, you will understand how people attempt to gain the world and, in the process, lose their soul. For they live empty, soulless lives.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Once you’ve done that, consider the true nature of worldly feelings, namely, the feelings of self-promotion and self-glorification. They are not natural; they were invented by your society and your culture to make you productive and controllable. Those feelings don’t produce the nourishment and happiness that comes about from contemplating nature, enjoying the company of friends, or loving your work. They were meant to produce thrills, excitement—and emptiness.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Recall the feeling you have when someone praises you, when you are approved, accepted, applauded. Now contrast that with the kind of feeling that arises within you when you look at the sunset or the sunrise—or nature in general—or when you read a book or watch a movie that you thoroughly enjoy. Get the taste of this feeling and contrast it with the first, namely, the one that was generated within you when you were praised. The first type of feeling comes from self-glorification and self-promotion. It is a worldly feeling. The second type comes from self-fulfillment, which is a soul feeling.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, and you don’t care. It doesn’t matter to you whether you win or lose. Now there’s human living for you. That’s what life is all about.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“We have been programmed to not suspect or doubt. We have been programmed to trust the assumptions that have been put into us by our tradition, culture, society, and religion. That’s another part of society’s brainwashing. If we are attached to power, money, property, fame, and success—if we seek these things as if our happiness depended on them—we will be considered a productive member of society, dynamic, and hardworking. In other words, if we pursue these things with a driving ambition that destroys the symphony of our life and makes us hard and cold and insensitive to others and to ourselves, society will look upon us as a dependable citizen, and our relatives and friends will be proud of the status that we have achieved.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“This is how your beliefs originate: they are fixed, unchanging ways of looking at a reality that is not fixed and unchanging at all, but constantly moving and changing. So, it is no longer the real world that you interact with and love, but a world created by your head. It is only when you drop your beliefs, fears, and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and the world.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. Might as well search for an eagle’s nest on the bed of an ocean—a search for happiness in the world outside you will be just as successful. If it is happiness that you seek, you can stop wasting your energy trying to cure your baldness, building up an attractive body, or changing your residence, your job, your community, your lifestyle, or even your personality. Do you realize that you could change every one of these things—you could have the finest looks, the most charming personality, and the most pleasant of surroundings—and still be unhappy? Deep down, you know this is true. But still you waste your effort and energy trying to get what you know cannot make you happy. Another false belief: If all of your desires are fulfilled, you will finally be happy. Not true. In fact, it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure, and fearful. Look at your list of your attachments and desires and to each of them, say these words: “Deep down in my heart, I know that even after I have gotten you, I will not get happiness.” Ponder the truth of these words. The fulfillment of desire can, at the most, bring flashes of pleasure and excitement. Don’t mistake them for happiness.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“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 and get rid of those attachments. When people stumble upon this self-evident truth, they become terrified at the thought of the pain involved in dropping their attachments. But the process is not a painful one at all. On the contrary, getting rid of attachments is a perfectly delightful task, that is, if the instrument you use to rid yourself of them is not willpower or renunciation, but sight. All you need to do is open your eyes and see that you do not really need the object of your attachment at all—that you were programmed, brainwashed into thinking that you could not be happy or you could not live without that particular person or thing.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“So how can you expect an attached person to enter that ocean of happiness called the Kingdom of God? As well as you can expect a camel to pass through the eye of a needle! Anyone who stops clinging to brothers, sisters, father, mother, children, land, or houses is repaid a hundred times over and gains eternal life. Then you will so easily take leave of your possessions, that is, you will stop clinging, and you will have destroyed clinging’s capacity to hurt you. Then, at last, you will experience that mysterious state that cannot be described or uttered—the state of abiding happiness and peace.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“An attachment, by its very nature, makes you vulnerable to emotional turmoil and is always threatening to shatter your peace.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“The positive element is the flash of pleasure and excitement, the thrill that you experience when you get what you are attached to. The negative element is the sense of threat and tension that always accompanies the attachment. Think of someone gobbling up food in a concentration camp. With one hand, he brings the food to his mouth; with the other hand, he protects it from neighbors who will grab it from him the moment he lowers his guard. There you have the perfect image of the attached person. Do you have any attachments to people or things that you falsely believe you could not be happy without? Make a list of them right now. Spend some time seeing each thing 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, and unhappiness on the other. Father and mother? Nightmare. Wife and children, brothers and sisters? Nightmare. All your possessions? Nightmare. Your life as it is now? Nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself you cannot live without? Nightmare.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Stop for a moment and contemplate in horror the endless list of attachments that you have become a prisoner to. Think of concrete things and persons, not abstractions. Once your attachment had you in its grip, you began to strive with every waking minute of your life to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of your attachment.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“Could you give me the inner richness that makes it possible for you to so easily give away this thing that would have made you the richest man in the world?”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well

“If you aren’t consciously aware, you’re vulnerable to either being brainwashed or being influenced by forces within you that you have no awareness of at all.”
― Anthony de Mello, Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well