Osho Quotes on Life

1. Life is so vast, so immense, so strange, mysterious, it cannot be reduced into a rule or a maxim. All maxims fall short, are too small; they cannot contain life and its living energies. Hence the golden rule is significant, that there are no golden rules. An authentic man does not live by rules, maxims, commandments. That’s the way of the pseudo-man. The authentic man simply lives.
2. The ego is false. If you live according to the false ego, your whole life will remain false. If you live without the ego your whole life will have the flavor of reality, truth and authenticity. Think, meditate, practice.
3. Life is a mystery. The more you understand it, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you know, the less you feel that you know. The more you become aware of the depth, the infinite depth, the more it becomes almost impossible to say anything about it
4. The whole of life is a preparation to be aware in death. That’s what a sannyasin should do, that’s what a seeker should do: be ready! Don’t lose a single moment, because once lost it cannot be regained. And the only richness that you can get out of it is by being more aware. Do whatsoever, but do it with alertness, awareness. Your lives may be different but your inner search cannot be different; it is the same.
5. Everything is mysterious: it is better to enjoy it rather than trying to understand it. Ultimately the man who goes on trying to understand life proves to be a fool, and the man who enjoys life becomes wise goes on enjoying life, because he becomes more and more aware of the mysterious that surrounds us. The greatest understanding is to know that nothing can be understood, that all is mysterious and miraculous. To me this is the beginning of religion in your life.
6. A man of meditation simply enjoys the flowers, the birds, the trees, the rain, the sun, the moon, the people. It is good that we are all engulfed in a mysterious whole. Life will be utterly boring if every mystery is decoded.
7. The mind always tries to avoid things which it cannot comprehend, and death is one of the most incomprehensible mysteries. There are only three mysteries: life, death and love. All these three are beyond mind. So mind takes life for granted; then there is no need to inquire. That is a way of avoiding. You never think, you never meditate on life; you have simply accepted it, taken it for granted. It is a tremendous mystery. You are alive, but don’t think that you have known life.
8. Buddha used to send his disciples to the funeral pyres to meditate there. The newcomers had to be there for three months in the beginning. Where bodies are burned, they would just sit there and watch, day in and day out. People would be brought in, burned, and then the friends would leave. What kind of life is this? What substance has it got? Just the other day, the man was so haughty, so proud, so egoistic, that if you had said anything wrong he would have jumped on you. And now where is he? Disappeared in the flames. This is what life is. “Sooner or later I am also going to be on the funeral pyre and all will be burned. So why bother, why make so much fuss? It is only a few days’ dream. And those few days are not much in the eternity of time, they are just momentary.”
9. People are living like somnambulists; mechanical is their life, unconscious is their behavior. They are not aware who they are, they are not aware what they are doing, they are not aware where they are going. Their life is accidental, a driftwood.
10. The religion of the Bauls is very down-to-earth; it believes in the here-now. It does not say that paradise is somewhere else; it is here, and you cannot postpone it, and all postponement is dangerous, suicidal. If you cannot discover it here-now, you will never discover it anywhere else because you will remain the same. And whenever you will be, life will always come in the form of here-now. So the only door to reality is here, this very moment.
11. Life is a mystery. There is no why, no purpose, no reason. It is simply here. Take it or leave it, but it is simply here. And when it is here, why not take it? Why waste your time in philosophizing? Why not dance and sing and love and meditate? Why not go deeper and deeper into this thing called “life”? Maybe at the ultimate core you will know the answer. But the answer comes in such a way that it cannot be expressed. It is like the dumb man’s taste of sugar. It is sweet — he knows that it is sweet, but he cannot say it. The buddhas know but they cannot say. And the idiots know not and they go on saying, and they go on giving you answers. Idiots are very clever in that way — in finding, fabricating, manufacturing answers. Ask any question and they will answer you.
12. Life is just a preparation for dying, and only those are wise who learn in their life how to die. If you don’t know how to die you have missed the whole meaning of life: it is a preparation, it is a training, it is a discipline.
13. You have to learn how to be alert and meditative; otherwise, you won’t get anything, no orgasmic experience. Because the experiencer will be in a coma. The whole life is a preparation for death, and you should be able to be so conscious in life that when you are making love, there are not only two persons, but four persons. Two persons making love, and two consciousnesses watching, witnessing. Or you are walking on the road, you have to walk with watchfulness, alertness, so that you can see your own body walking.
14. If you take life easily, if you enjoy life, if your life by and by becomes a fulfillment, the same will be your death. What are we doing? We are not enjoying life, we are only preparing to enjoy it — and life is here and now, no preparation is needed. I see people always preparing — they are preparing to live a great life somewhere in the future. They will be afraid of death because in the future death is waiting. And your life is also in the future. You are making a house, purchasing a car, and this and that, accumulating things; just getting ready to live. You will never be ready, and by the time you are ready, death will knock at your door. That’s the fear: that death may come before you are ready. A man of understanding lives life here and now, every moment he lives it. For him there is no death because there is no future life. He exhausts the moment, he lives it totally, he enjoys it, he thanks God for it, he is grateful.
15. Live here now! Living in hope is living in the future, which is really postponing life. It is not a way of living, but a way of suicide. There is no need for any hope and there is no need to feel hopeless. Live here now. Life is tremendously blissful, it is showering here and you are looking somewhere else. It is just in front of your eyes, but your eyes have moved far away, they look at the horizon. It is within you, but you are not there.
16. The dimension of the Baul is here-now; the dimension of the American is somewhere else — then-there, but never here-now. The American is chasing, chasing hard, trying to get something out of life, trying to squeeze life. Nothing comes out of it because that is not the way. You cannot squeeze life; you have to surrender to it. You cannot conquer life. You have to be so courageous to be defeated by life. Defeat is victory there, and the effort to be victorious is going to prove to be nothing but your final, UTTER failure. Life cannot be conquered because the part cannot conquer the whole. It is as if a small drop of water is trying to conquer the ocean. Yes, the small drop can fall into the ocean and become the ocean, but it cannot conquer the ocean. In fact, dropping into the ocean, slipping into the ocean is the way to conquer. Dissolve yourself.