Osho Quotes on Life, Osho Sayings on Life Osho on Life

Osho Quotes on Life

1. Life is a mystery to be lived, not to be understood.
2. If you live a bored life, nobody else is responsible for it but you. You ask for boredom. And boredom is misery. You ask for boredom because you ask for repetition.
3. When you are in danger and you are facing life, you are for the first time in contact with your soul. The soul is not cheap. You have to put everything at stake.
4. Buddha says: Life should be simple, not complex. Life should be based on needs, not on desires. Needs are perfectly okay: you need food, you need clothes, you need a shelter, you need love, you need relationship. Perfectly good, nothing wrong in it. Needs can be fulfilled; desires are basically unfulfillable. Desires create complexity. They create complexity because they can never be fulfilled. You go on and on working hard for them, and they remain unfulfilled, and you remain empty.
5. The first thing about livelihood is: it should be based on needs, not on desires. Then a very small quantity of things is enough. Secondly: it should not be violent. You should not do something just because you can get some money out of it. You can kill somebody and get some money, you can be a butcher and you can make your livelihood, but that is inhuman… and very unconscious. Better ways are possible. One should be creative in one’s livelihood, one should not be destructive.
6. One should be a little more alert. Money is not all, and one should not destroy one’s own life just in accumulating money. Poverty can be tremendously beautiful. If you are just living by your needs, poverty can be a tremendous contentment. In fact, you will never find rich people contented. Sometimes you can come across a beggar with a contented face, but never a millionaire.
7. If you are talking, be watchful. If you are listening, be watchful. If you are eating, be watchful. Never allow any act to be done without awareness, and then nothing else is needed. This awareness will spread all over your life; it will be a twenty-four-hour thing. There is no need to keep separate hours for meditation. And Buddha says that meditation cannot be separate from life; it has to spread and mix with life, it has to be one with life.
8. Life is such a complex phenomenon; how can you be certain? Everything is possible and nothing is certain. If you become afraid, this is just your psychology. Something has to be done to your mind.
9. It is very simple: pain is there because pleasure is there. Pleasure cannot exist without pain. If you want a life absolutely painless, then you will have to live a life absolutely pleasureless. They come together in one package. They are not two things really; they are one thing — not different, not separate, and cannot be separated.
10. What I suggest is a very life-affirmative, life-loving way. My suggestion is: when there is pain, go deeply into it, don’t avoid it. Let it be so, be open to it, become as sensitive as possible. Let the pain and its arrow penetrate you to your very core. Suffer it. And when the pleasure comes, let that too move you to your innermost core. Dance it. When there is pain be with pain, and when there is pleasure be with pleasure. Become so totally sensitive that each moment of pain and pleasure is a great adventure.
11. Be innocent, not knowledgeable. Be ignorant. It is better, because in your ignorance you accept the mystery of life. Life cannot be explained. All explanations are very tiny, small, rigid; and life is so vast, so immense — it cannot be contained in any explanation.
12. Life is there to be lived. Life has no question-mark; it is a mystery, there is no explanation. And it is good that there is none: it would be a great misfortune if there were an explanation. If there were an answer that could satisfy you, just think how flat things would become, how boring, how monotonous — because no answer can answer your questions. Life remains an adventure, it remains a constant search. Searching, one day you come to a point where you understand that you are wasting your energies in searching. The same energies can be put to celebration. You can enjoy.
13. That is one of the great secrets of life, that life is a movement. And if you are stuck somewhere you lose contact with life.
14. That is what meditation is too: you have to flower in your own being. You don’t know what you are going to be, you don’t know what flowers will come to you, what will be their color and what will be their perfume — you don’t know. You move into the unknown. You simply trust life-energy. It has given birth to you, it is your foundation, it is your being. You trust it. You know that you are a child of this universe, and this universe, if it has given birth to you, will take care too.
15. A real sannyasin is one who does not care about others’ opinions, who has decided to live his life as he wants to live it. I don’t mean for you to be irresponsible. When you start living your life responsibly, you not only care about yourself, you care about others also — but in a totally different way.
16. Now you will take every care that you don’t interfere in anybody else’s life — this is what responsibility is. You don’t allow anybody to interfere in your life, and naturally, you will not interfere in anybody’s life. You don’t want anybody to guide your life, you don’t want your life to be a guided tow. A guided tour is not a tour at all. You want to explore on your own. You want to move in the forest without any map, so that you can also be a discoverer, so that you can also come to some fresh spots for the first time.
17. You cannot eat respectability, and you cannot eat money, and you cannot eat prestige. They are just games: meaningless, stupid, mediocre. if you are intelligent enough you will understand that you have to live your life and you are not to bother about other things. All other considerations are meaningless: it is your life. You have to live it authentically, lovingly, with great passion and with great compassion, with great energy. You have to become a tidal wave of bliss. Whatsoever is needed to do for it, do.Unlearning will be needed. Unlearning means that you stop those wrong routes, you stop moving in those wrong ways that the society has forced persuaded you, seduced you to go in. You take charge of your own life; you become your own master. That is the meaning of sannyas. That’s why I call sannyasins SWAMI. ‘SWAMI’ means: one who has become a master of his own life. It has nothing to do with orthodox SWAMIS; they are not masters of their own lives. They are again on the same train, with the same society, with the same stupid power, prestige, politics.