Looking for inspiration? These quotes from Indian Guru Osho (a.k.a Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh) can help you.
Table of Contents
Osho Quotes on Love
1. “If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.”
2. “If you love a person you will not interfere with his personal life. You would not dare to break the boundaries of his inner world.”
3. “The intelligent person depends on his won insight; he trusts his own being. He loves and respects himself.”
4. “It is beautiful to be alone, it is also beautiful to to be in love, to be with people. And they are complementary, not contradictory.”
5. “When you love, love as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man.”
6. “Love is the goal, life is the journey.”
7. Love the person, but give the person total freedom. Love the person, but from the very beginning make it clear that you are not selling your freedom. Osho Click To Tweet
8. “Love is a spiritual phenomenon; lust is physical. Ego is psychological; love is spiritual.”
9. “Love is the opposite of [lust]: respecting the other as an end unto himself or herself. When you love someone as an end unto himself, then there is no feeling of hurt; you become enriched through it. Love makes everybody rich.”
10. “If you love a person, you accept the total person. With all the defects. Because those defects are a part of the person. Never try to change a person you love, because the very effort to change says that you love half, and the other half of the person is not accepted. When you love, you simply love.”
11. “Never demand perfection. You have no right to demand anything from anybody. If somebody loves you, be thankful, but don’t demand anything—because the other has no obligation to love you.”
12. “only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.”
13. “A woman is to be loved, not understood.
14. “You may come to know the manifestations of love, but not love itself.”
15. “People say love is blind because they do not know what love is. I say unto you, only love has eyes; other than love, everything is blind.”
16. “That’s why it is called “falling in”—you are no longer the controller, you simply fall in. That’s why people who are very head-oriented will say love is blind.”
17. “Inside yourself, try to see it; the other is never responsible. Remember that as a mantra: The other is never responsible.”
18. “People think that they can love only when they find a worthy partner—nonsense! You will never find one. People think they will love only when they find a perfect man or a perfect woman. Nonsense! You will never find them, because perfect women and perfect men don’t exist. And if they exist, they won’t bother about your love. They will not be interested. I have heard about a man who remained a bachelor his whole life because he was in search of a perfect woman. When he was seventy, somebody asked, “You have been traveling and traveling—from New York to Kathmandu, from Kathmandu to Rome, from Rome to London you have been searching. Could you not find a perfect woman? Not even one?” The old man became very sad. He said, “Yes, once I did. One day, long ago, I came across a perfect woman.” The inquirer said, “Then what happened? Why didn’t you get married?” Sadly, the old man said, “What to do? She was looking for a perfect man.”
19. “Love and respect yourself and never compromise for anything. And then you will be surprised how much growth starts happening of its own accord.. as if rocks have been removed and the river has started flowing.”
20. A single moment of love is equal to the whole eternity of love. Osho Click To Tweet
21. “Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of Love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving.”
22. “You can have plastic flowers; that’s what people have—marriage, their family, their children, their relatives, everything is plastic.”
23. “Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don’t know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.”
24. “Be less of a judge and you will be surprised that when you become a witness and you don’t judge yourself, you stop judging others too. And that makes you more human, more compassionate, more understanding.”
Most of the quotes in this part are taken from “Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness and Relate Without Fear”
Osho Quotes on Life
25. “Be – don’t try to become.”
26. “A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life, and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do.”
27. “To be creative means to be in love with life.”
28. “Respect life, revere life. There is nothing more holy than life, nothing more divine than life.”
29. “Be a lotus flower. Be in the water, and do not let the water touch you.”
30. “Life is not a problem. To look at it as a problem is to take a wrong step. It is a mystery to be lived, loved, experienced.”
31. Commit as many mistakes as possible, remembering only one thing: don’t commit the same mistake again. And you will be growing. Osho Click To Tweet
32. “Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand – relax. If you relax it comes, if you relax it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”
33. “One just needs a little alertness to see and find out: Life is really a great cosmic laughter.”
34. “Find ecstasy within yourself. It is not out there. It is in your innermost flowering. The one you are looking for is you.”
35. “When I say be creative I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.”
36. Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning. Osho Click To Tweet
37. “I live my life based on 2 principles. One, I live as if today was my last day on earth. Two, I live today as if I am going to live forever.”
38. “What is discipline? Discipline means creating an order within you. As you are, you are a chaos.”
39. “Don’t try to understand life. Live it! Don’t try to understand love. Move into love. Then you will know and that knowing will come out of your experiencing.”
40. “Be realistic: Plan for a miracle.”
41. “It is a strange thing, that every child is born with a closed hand, and every body dies with an open hand.”
42. Tomorrow never comes, it is always today. Osho Click To Tweet
43. “You are being taught everything, but you are not being taught to be yourself. This is the ugliest form of society possible, because it makes everybody miserable.”
44. “Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don’t be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don’t pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being.”
Osho Quotes on Fear and Courage
45. “Life begins where fear ends.”
46. “Don’t move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.”
47. “The greatest fear in the world is the opinion of others, and the moment you are unafraid of the crowd, you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.”
48. “Fear is only a feminine form of anger and anger is a masculine form of fear. Fear is a passive form of anger and anger is an active form of fear.”
49. “Allow the fear. Tremble with it, let it shake your foundations – and enjoy it as a deep experience of stirring. Don’t take any attitude about fear. In fact, don’t call it fear; the moment you have called it fear you have taken an attitude. You have already condemned it; you have already said that it is wrong, that it should not be there. You are already on guard, already escaping, running away. In a very subtle way you have broken yourself away from it. So don’t call it fear. This is one of the most essential things – to stop calling things names. Just watch the feeling of it, the way it is.”
50. Just a simple principle: remember, anything that makes you afraid, fearful, is a clear indication of what you have to do. Osho Click To Tweet
51. “You have to do just the opposite. You are not to become a follower of fear, you have to fight your fear. The moment you decide to fight your fear, you are on the way towards enlightenment.”
52. “Fear is always around some desire. You want to become a famous man, the most famous man in the world – then there is fear.”
53. “Fear is intelligence – so when you see a snake crossing the path, you jump out of the way. It is not cowardly, it is simply intelligent. …Fear can become abnormal, … pathological. Then you are afraid of things of which there is no need to be afraid.”
54. “Don’t say, ‘I am feeling fear.’ That is a wrong way of saying it. Don’t say, ‘I am afraid.’ That also is a wrong way of saying it. Simply say, ‘I am fear. In this moment I am fear.’ Don’t create any division.
55. “Courage is a love affair with the unknown.”
Osho Quotes on Freedom
56. “My vision of freedom is to be yourself”
57. .”Freedom from oneself Is the ultimate freedom.”
58. “It is not a question of getting freedom from something. That freedom will not be freedom, because it is still given to you; there is a cause to it. The thing that you were feeling dependent on is still there in your freedom. You are obliged to it. Without it you would not have been free.
59. “The freedom to do anything you want is not freedom either, because wanting, desiring to do something, arises out of the mind – and mind is your bondage.
60. “Freedom from things is dependent on the outside. Freedom to do something is also dependent on the outside. Freedom to be ultimately pure has not to be dependent on anything outside you.
61. “You are born as freedom. It is just that you have been conditioned to forget it. Layers upon layers of conditionings have made you a puppet. The strings are in somebody else’s hands.
62. Freedom is the ultimate experience of life. There is nothing higher than that. And out of freedom many flowers blossom in you. Love is the flowering of your freedom. Compassion, another flowering of your freedom. Osho Click To Tweet
63. “Never belong to a crowd; Never belong to a nation; Never belong to a religion; Never belong to a race. Belong to the whole existence. Why limit yourself to small things? When the whole is available.”
64. “Nobody loves anything more than freedom. Even love is secondary to freedom; freedom is the highest value. Love can be sacrificed for freedom, but freedom cannot be sacrificed for love.”
65. “You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love. Freedom is a criterion: anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong. If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, will start settling on the right path about everything: your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are.”
66. “You need either to create something or to discover something. Either bring your potential to actuality or go inwards to find yourself, but do something with your freedom.”
Osho Quotes on Death
67. “Death is not the end, but the beginning of a new life.”
68. “From forty-nine to fifty-six this aloneness becomes your focus of being. Everything else in the world loses meaning. The only remaining meaningful thing is this aloneness. From fifty-six to sixty-three you become absolutely what you are going to become: the potential blossoms, and from sixty-three to seventy you start getting ready to drop the body. Now you know you are not the body, you know you are not the mind either. The body was known as separate from you somewhere around the time when you were thirty-five. That the mind is separate from you was known near the time when you were forty-nine. Now, everything else drops except the witnessing self. Just the pure awareness, the flame of awareness remains with you—and this is the preparation for death.”
69. “Seventy is the natural life span for human beings. And if things move in this natural course then one dies with tremendous joy, with great ecstasy, feeling immensely blessed that life has not been meaningless, that at least one has found his home. And because of this richness, this fulfillment, one is capable of blessing the whole of existence. Just to be near such a person at the time of death is a great opportunity. You will feel, as the person leaves the body, as if some invisible flowers are falling upon you. Although you cannot see them, you can feel them. It is sheer joy, so pure that even to have a little taste of it is enough to transform your whole life.”
70. To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life. Osho Click To Tweet
71. “Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source.”
72. “Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life.”
73. “These are only outer symptoms. Death is the transfer of the soul from one body to another body, or in cases when a man is fully awakened, from one body to the body of the whole universe. It is a great journey, but you cannot know it from the outside. From outside, only symptoms are available; and those symptoms have made people afraid.
74. “Those who have known death from inside lose all fear of death.”
75. “Only the idea of ego creates the fear of death. When there is no ego there is no death. You are utter silence, deathlessness, eternity – not as you, but as an open sky, uncontaminated by any idea of ‘I’, of self – unbounded, undefined. Then there is no fear.”
76. The greatest mystery in life is not life itself, but death. Death is the culmination of life, the ultimate blossoming of life. Osho Click To Tweet
77. “There is nothing to be worried about. You will disappear like a snowflake in pure air. You are not going to die, you are only going to disappear. Yes, you will not be found in the individual form. The form will disappear into the formless – the snowflake into the pure air. But you will be there and more so. When the river disappears into the ocean, it is not dying – it is becoming the ocean, it is spreading, it is becoming bigger, huge, enormous, infinite.”
78. “Live life! In living life, death is avoided.”
79. “Being against death means you will miss the greatest mystery. And being against death also means that you will miss life itself – because they are deeply involved in each other; they are not two. Life is growing, death is the flowering of it. The journey and the goal are not separate; the journey ends in the goal.”
80. “Each moment is a birth and a death. You flow between these two banks, birth and death. Your river of life is possible only because of birth and death – and it is each moment that it is happening.”
81. “You welcome death. And unless you can welcome death, one thing is certain – you have not lived.”
Source: Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance
Osho Quotes on Happiness
82. Whatever you feel, you become. It is your responsibility. Osho Click To Tweet
83. “To be a happy person, one has to drop all comparison. Drop all these stupid ideas of being superior and inferior. You are neither superior nor inferior. You are simply yourself! There exists no one like you, no one with whom you can be compared. Then, suddenly, you are at home.”
84. “Never be ashamed of your tears. Be proud that you are still natural. Be proud that you can express the inexpressible through your tears.”
85. “Always remember to judge everything by your inner feeling of bliss.”
86. “If you really want peace on earth, create peace in your heart, in your being. That is the right place to begin with and then spread.”
87. If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible – only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too. Osho Click To Tweet
88. “Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”
89. “You feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy.”
90. “Whatever you are doing, don’t let past move your mind; don’t let future disturb you.”
Osho Quotes on Success
91. “A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.”
92. “There is no greater ecstasy than to know who you are.”
93. “There is no greater ecstasy than to know who you are.”
94. “Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.”
95. “A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life – the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave.”
96. “You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.”
97. “Mind: A beautiful servant, a dangerous master.”
98. “Darkness is an absence of light. Ego is an absence of awareness.”
99. “No thought, no mind, no choice — just being silent, rooted in yourself.”
100. “Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more.”
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Featured image credits:
Ma Vivek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
