Anthony de Mello Quotes About Children
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Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
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You will seek for God in vain till you understand that God can't be seen as a "thing"; he needs a special way of looking - similar to that of little children whose sight is undistorted by prefabricated doctrines and beliefs.
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There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion
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If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future.
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How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.
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The master never seemed to have his fill of gazing at his firstborn child. "What do you want him to be when he grows up?" someone asked. "Outrageously happy," said the master.
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Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture.
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