Osho Quotes on Confidence – Courage is confidence in oneself

Osho Quotes on Confidence

1. When one starts trusting oneself, one can trust life, God.
2. A worldly man means a man whose confidence is in his own ego.
3. People want to be with the crowd because they lack self-confidence.
4. Faith means faith in oneself. Faith means a confidence, a respect for oneself.
5. Regain your confidence, your self-respect, the understanding that nothing is wrong with you.
6. Awaken your confidence in yourself. It does not matter how dense the forest is or how dark the night is, all you have to do is kindle the lamp within. It will accompany you to the end. Up to what point and for how long can outside lamps be trusted?
7. What do you need self-confidence for? If you are, self-confidence will be like a shadow to you. It will follow you. You don’t carry your shadow, you don’t look back again and again to see whether it is coming or not, you don’t get an insurance for it. You don’t care. It follows. Self-confidence is always there when you have become a self. You are not yet a self, you are just an ego. Remember this difference between the ego and the self. The self is divine, the ego is human. The ego is manufactured by education, society, ambition, politics, morality, and all that; the self is not manufactured, it is discovered. The ego is an invention, the self is a discovery.
8. Self-confidence is not a quality for the inner journey, it is a barrier. In the outer world self-confidence is a help, is a must. Without it you cannot go anywhere in the outside world, because ego is needed, a sort of madness is needed. But when you move to the inner, all the qualities that are helpful in the outer journey become obstacles. Self is not needed, self-confidence is not needed. One should completely lose the self, only then is there a possibility of enlightenment. YOU never become enlightened. When you are not, there IS enlightenment.
9. I ask you what is the need for self-confidence? Why are you so worried about it? Perhaps you feel the other person is more successful; perhaps he is more self-confident. Your contemporary earns more than you, or perhaps he has made headway in business or politics. You feel you have lagged behind. You feel it is because of the lack of self-confidence. Hence the urge. To worry about self-confidence means you are comparing yourself with others. Hence the distress. You are you, the other is the other. Had you been alone in the world, would you have felt this disparity? Would you have felt this inferiority complex? No, you would have been an ordinary person. And “ordinary” means you would not have even been conscious of your ordinariness. You would have just been. He who is conscious of his ordinariness has taken a step towards being non-ordinary. That you are is enough. Self-confidence is not necessary; the self is enough. You are! Why do you compare yourself with others? All kinds of troubles start once you begin to see yourself vis-a-vis others.
10. Everybody keeps on repeating to himself: I am confident. Why? What are you hiding? If this confidence that you talk about is really there then there is no need to say anything about it. A really confident man is not even aware of it. This has to be understood — whenever something is false you are aware of it, self-conscious. When something is real, you simply forget it. Do you remember that you are breathing? If something goes wrong, yes. If it is hard and there is something wrong with your lungs and you have a cold or asthma, then you remember that you are breathing. But when everything goes okay, you are not conscious. WHEN THE SHOE FITS, THE FOOT IS FORGOTTEN. When you are really confident, confidence is forgotten.
11. In fact, we only look for witnesses when we have no faith in ourselves. When we have full confidence in ourselves, there is no need for witnesses or any proof.
12. A constructive mind cannot remain gloomy and approaches life’s problems with confidence. Instead of losing courage by the magnitude of his misfortunes he gathers his wits to meet them squarely. How can such a man, who knows no defeat, spread anything else around except joy and cheerfulness? Instead of counting our misfortunes let us take a mental stock of our blessings and we shall be surprised to see how many blessings we have received without actually deserving them.
13. One should be self-confident and one should be proud of oneself — not against anybody, not in comparison to anybody but just because one is oneself. You have to be loving towards yourself and you have to be proud that you are yourself, that God has made you you. If a person is not proud about himself he will hate himself, he will be self-destructive, he will have a kind of inferiority complex.
14. To stand on one’s own, free of the crowd, is courage. To help a child to be as he is, is to give him courage. Courage is confidence in oneself, in one’s self. Courage is self-confidence.
15. Whenever a person feels the lack of self-confidence, he becomes easily angry. In fact anger is always an indication that you are not self-confident. A person who is confident about himself is not easily angry. It is very difficult for him to get into anger. It is our weakness that leads us into anger. The stronger you are, the less anger will be there. The strongest person goes beyond anger. Anger is weakness.
16. If you approach reality out of fear and trembling, you are approaching in a wrong way, and when you are approaching in a wrong way, whatsoever you come to see and feel will be wrong. Your eyes are wrong, your heart is wrong. Truth cannot be known out of fear, truth can only be known out of fearlessness. SHADDHA is needed, a confidence in oneself is needed, a trust in one’s own being is needed.
17. With self-confidence, confidence is just a shadow; the real thing is the self. There is no self — how can there be self-confidence? A real man, a man who has known, lives without self, lives without self-confidence. Not that he lives in a kind of no-confidence — with confidence disappearing, unconfidence also disappears. He simply LIVES, not bothering about confidence or no-confidence. He simply lives. He is unworried, because the whole has taken care. He has surrendered to the whole, now the whole knows better. He simply flows with the whole — wherever it is going, he is also going. He is in a surrender.
18. When you are really attuned, really rich in the inner world, you are not concerned with exhibition. When you first go to a temple, your prayer is a little louder than others. It has to be. You want to show off. The showmanship is part of the ego, what you show is not the problem. You show, you exhibit. Then the ego is there, the boat is not empty — and a man of Tao is an empty boat. He is gentle, not aware; he is innocent, not knowing; he is wise, that’s why he can move as a fool, not worried. Whatsoever he does makes no difference, his wisdom is intact, he can afford to be foolish. You cannot. You are always afraid that somebody may think you a fool. You are afraid that if others think you to be a fool, you will start suspecting it. If so many people think you a fool your self-confidence will be lost. And if everybody goes on repeating that you are a fool, sooner or later you will come to believe it. Only a wise man cannot be deceived, he can appear as a fool.
19. If a man begins to live by hanging his consciousness on the peg of the navel-centre, all mental-fatigue vanishes. A unique freshness pervades his mind, a serene calmness flows within him and he gains a self-confidence which only those who have found their centre attain.
20. Lose the self too! Lose self-confidence, lose self. Let them go, they are all diseases. You just relax into non-being. And remember, I am not saying that the man of non-being is un-self-confident. He simply lives, like the trees are living. Do you think any tree is self-confident? or un-self-confident? Do you think any river is self-confident or un-self-confident? The whole question is irrelevant; you cannot ask that question, it is pointless, it is meaningless. The trees flow, grow. The rivers flow, grow. Things are happening. There is nobody taking care of everything. To surrender to this happening is to disappear as an ego. And great joy arises with that surrender.
21. My own observation is the stronger the person, the easier is the surrender. Only the strong man can surrender, because he trusts himself, he is confident of himself, he knows that he can let go. He is unafraid. He is ready to explore the unknown, he is ready to go into the uncharted. he is thrilled by the journey of the unknown. He wants to taste it, whatsoever the cost and whatsoever the risk. He wants to live in danger.
22. You are unbounded. AS you are in your pure being, no limitation exists — you are a god. But to KNOW that godhood, don’t start fighting with the prison, otherwise you will never be a winner. And more and more you will be defeated, and more and more you will feel frustrated, and more and more you will lose self-confidence, more and more you will feel that it seems impossible to get out of it. Start by becoming more aware. Start by becoming more alert, more attentive. That is the only thing that has to be done.
23. But the most basic problem arises in the first step. The first step is always the most basic. The second follows easily, the third even more easily, the fourth without any problem — it comes on its own accord. But the first is the most difficult step . Have you not watched a small child starting to walk? The first step is the most difficult step. The child hesitates. He has never walked. The child has no self-confidence. He cannot trust that he will be able to walk — how can you trust the unknown? That which you have never done before I Again and again the child starts crawling, afraid that he may fall, that he may hurt himself. The first step is the most difficult step. Once he has taken the first step then it is very difficult to prevent him from taking the second, from taking the third. It is impossible to prevent him. Whenever the mother is not looking he will try again. He may fall but now he has known the adventure, the beauty of it — that he can stand on his own.
24. Man lives in a kind of self-exile; it is self-imposed exile. We have made a small capsule around ourselves; we have become encapsulated, alienated. And then we suffer, then we are miserable. Then we can’t find any meaning in life, any significance in life. Then we feel uprooted, ungrounded. Then we feel accidental, as if we are not needed at all, as if existence would go on running in the same way whether we are or we are not. That gives us a deep wound. We lose confidence, trust in ourselves. We become something futile, unneeded, useless; just by accident we have come into existence. And this whole nonsense arises because we have created the idea of the ego.
25. That’s what the so-called missionaries of all the religions have been doing down the ages. They go to help people but they simply make them feel more guilty. They create misery for others. In the name of service they destroy people’s integrity, their confidence, their self-respect. In the name of service they create such guilt in them that they lose all confidence in themselves. They become self-condemnors. They start feeling that they are sinners and that they are doomed… their sins are so much that they are bound to go to hell. Their lives become burdened. And this is because of the people who wanted to help them. All the so-called religious people have been harming and poisoning people for the simple reason that their own misery is the root cause of their so-called service, help, mission. In my approach only a blissful person can be a helper of mankind, because a blissful person can share his bliss and a blissful person can accept people with all their limitations. He understands, he is capable of understanding. And he is so blissful that he cannot call people sinners, he cannot see any sin anywhere. He sees only gods and goddesses everywhere. It is impossible for him to believe that there is a hell. If there is a god there cannot be a hell. If there is hell then there can be no god, because god means compassion. If god cannot forgive small sins… who will be able to forgive if even god is incapable of forgiving?
26. It is just that your ego is dying — these are just the symptoms. When the ego dies you feel that you are losing power, because all the power that you have known was of the ego. When the ego starts dying you feel that you are losing self-confidence because all the confidence was of the ego. You start feeling that you are no more certain of anything, because all the certainty was of the ego. But all that is from the ego is just deception. Power, certainty, self-confidence, will — all nonsense. If you can be courageous enough to pass through this period, soon the ego will disappear with all its power, and the power trip and the confidence, and the certainties — all of which were nothing but facades to hide doubts, and clever tricks to try to deceive yourself with. When all that has gone the whole circus, you will feel very clean, purified, serene and silent. Not powerful, not certain, not self-confident — but very serene and very quiet, with no certainty and no uncertainty, with no power and no impotence, with no self-confidence or with no lack of self-confidence. In fact with no self.