OSHO QUOTES

OSHO QUOTES ON LIFE, LOVE, MEDITATION, ZEN, FRIENDLINESS, LAUGHTER, SPIRITUALITY, FREEDOM

• Experience life in all possible ways good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.

• 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.

• Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of Love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving.

• The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another 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. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

• Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars… and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason, it is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

 

• 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.

• 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.

• The world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house.You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever. Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you -the furniture, the paintings on the wall .You use them - you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed -but nothing belongs to you. You are just here for a few minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that’s yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room.The waiting may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether you wait seven hours, or seventy years?You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room.You may star t thinking perhaps you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built.You may start putting your nameplate on the waiting room.

• There is only a difference of proportion of madness between an average man and a mad man; the quality of madness is the same.

• Man, naturally, should be a vegetarian because the whole body is made for vegetarian food. Even scientists concede to the fact that the whole structure of the human body shows that man should not be a non-vegetarian. Man comes from the monkeys and monkeys are vegetarians -absolute vegetarians. If Darwin is correct, then man should be a vegetarian. Now, there are ways to judge whether a certain species of animal is vegetarian or non-vegetarian: it depends on the length of the intestine. Non-vegetarian animals have a very small intestine. Tigers and lions have a very small intestine because meat is already a digested food. It does not need a long intestine to digest it. The work of digestion has been done by the animal and now you are eating the animal’s meat. It is already digested; a long intestine is not needed. Man has one of the longest intestines -that means man is a vegetarian.

• Man ordinarily lives in loneliness. To avoid loneliness, he creates all kinds of relationships, friendships, organizations, political parties, religions and what not. But the basic thing is that he is very much afraid of being lonely. Loneliness is a black hole, a darkness, a frightening negative state almost like death, as if you are being swallowed by death itself. To avoid it, you run out and fall into anybody, just to hold somebody’s hand, to feel that you are not lonely. Nothing hurts more than loneliness.But the trouble is, any relationship that arises out of the fear of being lonely is not going to be a blissful experience, because the other is also joining you out of fear. You both call it love. You are both deceiving yourself and the other. It is simply fear, and fear can never be the source of love. Only those who love are absolutely fearless; only those who love are able to be alone, joyously, whose need for the other has disappeared, who are sufficient unto themselves.

• The day you decide that all these efforts are failures, that your loneliness has remained untouched by all your efforts, that is a great moment of understanding. Then only one thing remains: to see whether loneliness is such a thing that you should be afraid of, or if it is just your nature. Then rather than running out and away, you close your eyes and go in. Suddenly the night is over, and a new dawn.The loneliness transforms into aloneness.

• Aloneness is your nature. You were born alone, you will die alone. And you are living alone without understanding it, without being fully aware of it. You misunderstand aloneness as loneliness; it is simply a misunderstanding. You are sufficient unto yourself.

• You are feeling sad? Befriend it. Have compassion for it. Sadness also has a being. Allow it, embrace it, sit with it, hold hands with it. Be friendly. Be in love with it. Sadness is beautiful! Nothing is wrong with it. Who told you that something is wrong in being sad? In fact, only sadness gives you depth. Laughter is shallow; happiness is skin-deep. Sadness goes to the very bones, to the marrow. Nothing goes as deep as sadness.

• Buddha says: Look into the nature of desire. Watch the movement of desire; it is very subtle. And you will be able to see two things: one, that desire by its very nature is unfulfillable. And second, the moment you understand that desire is unfulfillable, desire disappears and you are left desireless. That is the state of peace, silence, tranquility. That is the state of fulfillment! People never come to fulfillment through desire; they come to fulfillment only by transcending desire.

• The grass beyond your fence is always greener, but don't jump the fence to see whether it is actually so. Enjoy it! If it is greener on the other side of the fence, enjoy it. Why destroy things by jumping the fence and finding out that it is worse than your own grass?

• To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing-any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.

• You can love as many people as you want - that does not mean one day you will go bankrupt, and you will have to declare, ‘Now I have no love.’ You cannot go bankrupt as far as love is concerned.

• Be like an alone peak high in the sky. Why should you hanker to belong? You are not a thing! Things belong!

• Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone.

• Discover yourself, otherwise you have to depend on other people’s opinions who don’t know themselves.

• Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one would like to share.

• NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

• Life is not logic, life is not philosophy. Life is a dance, a song, a celebration! It is more like love and less like logic.

• Your honesty, Your love, Your compassion should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures.

• Friendship is a relationship, friendliness is a state of your being. You are simply friendly; to whom, that is not the point. .

• Take it easy, and remember -Easy is Right.

• You are a great problem- creator. Just understand this and suddenly problems disappear.

• It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love, or how you love, it matters only that you love.

• The person who can be happy alone is really an individual. If your happiness depends on the others, you are a slave. You are yet not free. You are in bondage.

• Life has no meaning. Rejoice! It has no meaning. Dance, sing, enjoy! It has no meaning. You need not be serious. It is a cosmic joke.

• Life is a purposeless play, a play of infinite forces- beautiful if you don’t have an achiever’s mind, ugly if you have ambitions to become something.

• Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy.

• A child needs immense privacy, as much as possible, a maximum of privacy, so that he can develop his individuality

• Love is true only when it does not interfere in the privacy of the other person. It respects his/her individuality, his/her privacy.

• You are the one who is witnessing it. It may be nothingness, it may be blissfulness, it may be silence, but one thing has to be remembered: however beautiful and however enchanting an experience you come across, you are not it. You are the one who is experiencing it. And if you go on and on and on, the ultimate in the journey is the point when there is no experience left - neither silence, nor blissfulness, nor nothingness. There is nothing as an object for you, but only your subjectivity.

• Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience.

• The mirror is empty; it is not reflecting anything. It is you.

• Everybody wants freedom as far as talking is concerned, but nobody really is free and nobody really wants to be free, because freedom brings responsibility. It does not come alone. And to be dependent is simple: the responsibility is not on you, the responsibility is on the person you are dependent on.So people have made a schizophrenic way of life. They talk about truth, they talk about freedom, and they live in lies, they live in slaveries - slaveries of many kinds, because each slavery frees you from some responsibility. A man who really wants to be free has to accept immense responsibilities. He cannot dump his responsibilities on anybody else. Whatever he does, whatever he is, he is responsible.

• Tantric experience means neither to be repressive nor to be indulgent. Tantric experience is possible only if you move deep into meditation, otherwise not. When you become very, very still, silent, aware, alert, then only is it possible that you will know something of Tantra. Otherwise, Tantra can also become an excuse for indulgence -a new name, a religious name. And you can move into indulgence behind the name of Tantra. Names won't make much change; your being needs change.

• 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.

• MY MEDITATION IS SIMPLE. IT DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY COMPLEX PRACTICES. IT IS SIMPLE. IT IS SINGING. IT IS DANCING. IT IS SITTING SILENTLY.

• That is the simple secret of happiness. Whatever you are doing, don't let past move your mind; don't let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet. To live in the memories, to live in the imagination, is to live in the non-existential. And when you are living in the non-existential, you are missing that which is existential. Naturally you will be miserable, because you will miss your whole life.

• This has been said again and again, down through the ages. All the religious people have been saying this; 'We come alone into this world, we go alone.' All togetherness is illusory. he very idea of togetherness arises because we are alone, and the aloneness hurts. We want to drown our aloneness in relationship. That's why we become so much involved in love. Try to see the point. Ordinarily you think you have fallen in love with a woman or with a man because she is beautiful, he is beautiful. That is not the truth. The truth is just the opposite: you have fallen in love because you cannot be alone. You were going to fall. You were going to avoid yourself somehow or other. And there are people who don't fall in love with women or men-then they fall in love with money. They start moving into money or into a power trip, they become politicians. That too is avoiding your aloneness. If you watch man, if you watch yourself deeply, you will be surprised-all your activities can be reduced to one single source. The source is that you are afraid of your aloneness. Everything else is just an excuse. The real cause is that you find yourself very alone.

• Life repeats itself mindlessly - unless you become mindful, it will go on repeating like a wheel. That's why Buddhists call it the wheel of life and death, the wheel of time. It moves like a wheel: birth is followed by death, death is followed by birth; love is followed by hate, hate is followed by love; success is followed by failure, failure is followed by success. Just see! If you can watch just for a few days, you will see a pattern emerging, a wheel pattern. One day, a fine morning, you are feeling so good and so happy, and another day you are so dull, so dead that you start thinking of committing suicide. And just the other day you were so full of life, so blissful that you were feeling thankful to God, that you were in a mood of deep gratefulness, and today there is great complaint and you don't see the point why one should go on living. And it goes on and on, but you don't see the pattern. Once you see the pattern, you can get out of it.

• Be realistic: "Plan for a miracle."

• Fools laugh at others. Wisdom laughs at itself.

• Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

• The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, inauthentic, insincere - and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.

• Don't move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.

• You will find meaning in life only if you create it. It is not lying there somewhere behind the bushes, so you can go and you search a little bit and find it. It is not there like a rock that you will find. It is a poetry to be composed, it is a song to be sung, it is a dance to be danced.

• This is what enlightenment is all about - a deep understanding that there is no problem. Then, with no problem to solve, what will you do? Immediately you start living. You will eat, you will sleep, you will love, you will work, you will have a chit-chat, you will sing, you will dance - what else is there to do?

• There is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good. Accept yourself.

• Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice.

• You cannot be truthful if you are not courageous.You cannot be loving if you are not courageous.You cannot be trusting if you are not courageous.You cannot enter into reality if you are not courageous. Hence courage comes first and everything else follows.

• Learn to laugh. Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease. Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly.

• The whole art of ecstasy, meditation, samadhi, is: How to become one with the rhythm of the universe. When it exhales, you exhale. When it inhales, you inhale. You live in it, are not separate, are one with it. 

• All methods of meditation are nothing but methods to help you to remember the art of let-go. I say remember, because you knew it already. And you know it still, but that knowledge is being repressed by the society.

• How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier.

• If you find a saint who has no sense of humor, then he is not a saint at all.

• Yoga means now you will have to be a harmony, you will have to become 'one'.

• Yoga means to encounter the reality as it is. 

• Truth happens in a state of not knowing, truth happens in innocence. Truth happens where there are no clouds of thoughts moving in your consciousness,when the sky is absolutely clear.

• Relax, let go. But remember only one thing: You are a witness.

• When you love a person all fear disappears. And when you are afraid all love disappears.

• What is a prayer? Prayer is sending blessing to all. Prayer is sending your compassion to all. Prayer is creating an antidote of negative thoughts.

• Love is the door, it is irrelevant with whom you have fallen in love. Love redeems, neither Jesus, nor Krishna. Love redeems.

• Love deeply, love without jealousy, love blissfully and help each other to be more meditative.

• Freedom means freedom from the mind. Then you are simply in a silence, and in that silence you melt, you merge with the whole. And to melt and merge with the whole is to be holy. Not by fasting, not by torturing, but by becoming one with the whole, one becomes holy.

• Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.

• Buddha says: Meditation brings two things. It brings wisdom, it brings freedom. These two flowers grow out of meditation. When you become silent, utterly silent, beyond the mind, two flowers bloom in you. One is of wisdom: you know what is and what is not. And the other is of freedom: you know now there are no more any limitations on you, either of time or of space. You become liberated. Meditation is the key to liberation, to freedom, to wisdom.

   

  

• Become aware, awake. Then you will see that everything comes and goes, all things come and pass. Life is a flux. Your consciousness is the only thing that is immovable, that is eternal. To attain it is freedom. To attain it is the goal of life. If you miss it you have missed your life and you have missed a tremendously great gift, a great opportunity.

• All meditations are nothing but efforts to bring you to the present. When you live in the present moment, with no past hanging around you, with no future projection, you are free from life and death, you are free from body and mind. You are free - simply free -you are freedom.

• Hell means nothing but misery; it is a psychological state of misery, a state of negativity, a state of darkness, of utter loneliness. And heaven is joy, happiness, health, light. But there is a third word, moksha. Moksha means freedom, freedom from both heaven and hell, freedom from pain and pleasure - because pain binds you as much as pleasure binds you. Pain may be an ugly chain and pleasure may be a beautiful chain, decorated, maybe made of gold, but it chains you. One has to be free of both.

SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV QUOTES

SADHGURU QUOTES ON LOVE AND LIFE

• A world full of love, light and laughter - its time has come.

• As many colors of the rainbow are an outcome of one pure light, many religions of the world are an expression of the same divine source.

• How can you love one and hate the other, when the same divine exists in all.

• The spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your very own nature, when you don't have to do anything to be happy, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change.

• True compassion is not about giving or taking. True compassion is doing just what is needed.

• Memory creates a hallucination of the past, desire creates a hallucination of the future.

• Spirituality does not mean going away from life. Spirituality means becoming alive in the fullest possible way so you are not just alive on the surface, you are alive to the core.

• The word ‘yoga’ literally means ‘union’. When you experience everything as one in your consciousness, then you are in yoga.

• Having a lot of money in your pocket is good, isn't it? If it enters your head it becomes misery because that's not its place. It should be in your pocket. If it's in your pocket, there are many wonderful things you can do in the world. It is a means, and it is a tremendous empowerment.

• Trees and humans are in an intimate relationship. What they exhale, we inhale, what we exhale they inhale. This is a constant relationship that nobody can afford to break or live without.

• One who is above his intellect, one who is no longer a part of his mind, is a Buddha. 

• You are not suffering yesterday or tomorrow. You are only suffering your memory and your imagination.

• Harmony in the world will happen only when man is truly  harmonious within himself.

• If you know how to keep yourself pleasant within, irrespective of what is happening around you, Ultimate Liberation cannot be denied to you.

• The physical needs logic. For that which is beyond the physical, logic is of no use.

• Life has come from a very beautiful source. If you remain in touch with that source, everything about you will be beautiful.

• A spiritual process is not a divorce from life. It is an irrevocable love affair with life.

• Money can only make your surroundings pleasant. It cannot create inner pleasantness.

• If you want everyone to fall in love with you, the first thing is, you must fall in love with all of them.

• Whenever a child enters people's lives, most people tend to think it is time to teach. No. When a child enters your life, it is time to learn because between you and your child, who is more joyful? - The child.

• Everything in this cosmos is happening wonderfully well. But just one nasty little thought coming up in your head is enough to make it a bad day.

• Whether god or somebody else loves you does not make a difference for you. If you are loving, it makes your life very sweet.

• When one is overfed and another one is hungry, I call that a disaster.

• The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.

• Too many people are hungry not because there is dearth of food. It is because there is dearth of love and care in human hearts.

• The fear is simply because you are not living with life, You are living in your mind.

• Sex in the body is fine. Money in the wallet is fine. It is only a problem when they enter your mind.  

• If you ask a tree how he feels to know that he's spreading his fragrance and making people happy, I don't think a tree looks at it that way. I am just like that, and it is just my nature to be like this.

• The most beautiful moments in life are moments when you are expressing your joy, not when you are seeking it.

• Once there is a distance between you and your thought process, a new freedom is born. With this freedom, a new perception arises.

• If you want to really know higher dimensions of life, there needs to be a constant sense of peacefulness and joyfulness within you.

• The quality of your life depends on how well you manage your body, your mind, your emotion, your situations, your home, your communities, nations, your life in general and the world.

• The hen that you are, how will you know what deceptive ways Grace will descend. It is Grace that brought you here and it is Grace that will deliver. I prefer the hen that looks up to the sky than an eagle that flies but always looking down. How high is not the question, but how intense is your longing for the sky. May you always be in Grace.

• Irrespective of what the nature of their immediate business may be, in reality there is only one business – the business of human well being. Whatever you are doing, fundamentally, you are doing it for human well being, it is just everyone’s scale and scope that is different. For one person, human well being means their well being alone. For another person, it includes their family; for another, it includes their community, nation or race. For another, it includes everyone and everything on the planet.

• With what you get, you can make a living. Only with what you give, you can make a life.

• If we are serious about saving the environment, we need to adjust our population growth to the natural resources that we have.

• Every society needs individuals who go on planting mango trees without thinking whether they would get to eat the fruit or not.

• The essence of Isha Yoga is to make every aspect of your life a stepping stone for a higher possibility.

• Your personality is something that you created. Once you are aware of that, you could create it whichever way you want.

• Fear has essentially come into human life because of lack of clarity. Wherever there is clarity, there is no fear.

• Meditation means to know life beyond the sphere of the physical; to know and experience life not just at the surface but at the source.

• In the vastness of the cosmic space, you are like a grain of sand.

• If you seek security in life, unknowingly you seek death. The only truly secure place is your grave.

• When you consciously choose to be ordinary, you become extraordinary.

• Everything that occurs in your life can enrich you if you handle it with awareness.

• If you stop your mental muddle, life is bliss.

• Health is not just being disease-free. Health is when every cell in your body is bouncing with life.

• Teachings and philosophies cannot transform people they can only inspire.

• When you become free from the meanness of the mind, an indiscriminate sense of love and inclusion arises.

• God is the Creator, not a manager. Humans have the privilege of managing their own lives.

• If the feminine is lost on the planet, nothing of beauty, nothing of tenderness, nothing of truly aesthetic value will survive.

• Likes are always bigger bondages than dislikes.

• Spiritual process is not for the dead or the dying. It is for those who want to become fully alive in all dimensions of life. 

• To live and operate in the world, you may have to identify with something. Play with your identifications  don't let them rule you.

• Family or no family; city or forest  your external arrangements don't decide how you are inside.

• Meditation is the only freedom as it is a dimension beyond the mind. All the stress and struggle are of the mind. 

• The seed of enlightenment is there in every being. Enlightenment is just a realization.

• Only when you are willing to look at the horror of who you are, the beauty of who you are can be nurtured.

• An idle mind is Divine's workshop. An idler's mind is devil's workshop.

• In enlightenment, there is no pleasure, no pain just nameless ecstasy. 

• Only when the masculine and the feminine play an equal role in our lives, there will be beauty and purpose to our existence.

• Love is a longing to include someone as a part of yourself. It is a possibility to become more than what you are, by inclusion.

• Whatever crisis is happening in your life, don't make a crisis out of yourself.

• Money is only a means, not a goal. 

• With every single action that we perform, with every single thought and feeling that we generate within us, we can create a better situation around us.

• Joy is a natural phenomenon. Misery is your creation. 

• Having children is not the key to a fulfilled life. You can have a dozen children and still be frustrated.

• When unpleasant things happen in our lives, we can become either wise or wounded- that is a choice we have. 

• If we can make just 1% of the population meditative, this world will be a different place. 

• If there is something that means something to you, you should not postpone it for a single day. 

• Everything comes from nothingness and goes back to nothingness. Nothingness is the basis of existence.

• Sadhana is to master one's body, mind, emotion, and energies.

• Diwali is not just about lighting lamps outside. Let your inner light shine.

• When there is no envy, jealousy, and comparison within you, you can focus your full capabilities on doing what is needed. 

• The idea of marriage is to multiply joy. If you multiply your miseries, its a crime.

• What you think of yourself and what the world thinks of you is only socially relevant. It has no existential relevance.

• May your decisions be based upon what truly matters and works, not upon your likes and dislikes.

• People try to create an outwardly perfect life, but the quality of life is based on the inward. 

• Whatever the shape of eyes and nose  a joyful face is always a beautiful face.

• Having the inner strength, balance, and capability to live well irrespective of outside situations and conditions-that is freedom.

• Only the physical can be threatened. When a dimension beyond the physical becomes a living experience for you, there will be no more fear. 

• Pain is a natural process. Suffering is self-created.

• To go through life effortlessly, children need an atmosphere that nurtures inner strength.

• It would be wonderful if this world was guided by little children, because they are closer to life than anyone else.

• A mundane life goes from womb to tomb. A life of awareness leads to liberation from the process of Life and Death.

• Your property, your education, your beliefs, everything will drop when you drop this body. The only thing that goes beyond this body is your awareness.

• You do not have a duty towards anyone or anything. If you have love and care, you will do what is needed.

• What happens in your life is not 100% in your control. But what you make out of it is 100% up to you.

• Joy is not to be sought outside  joy is your original state of being. If you do not mess up your mind, you will naturally be joyful.

• To be in company is sweet. To be alone is absolute.

• Propelled by rage, we substitute one injustice for another. Propelled by compassion, we do what is needed. 

• A spiritual person and a materialistic person are both seeking the same infinite. One is seeking it consciously, the other one unconsciously.

• Life knows no failure. Failure exists only for those who are always comparing themselves with others.

• Never try to destroy the enemy. Destroy the enmity.

• Being human means being capable of looking at every life form with a sense of tenderness.

• Whenever you give others poison, a part of it enters you too. Whenever you give others nourishment, a part of it enters you too.

• Optimists hallucinate; pessimists get depressed. Both will not get anywhere. You must be willing to see everything the way it is. 

• If you raise your inner energies to their highest pitch, God becomes a reality.

• Awareness is life. Life is awareness. There is no other way to be.

• A situation becomes stressful only when you compulsively react to it. 

• For wealth to translate into well being, you need a spiritual element within you.

• Mind is madness. Only when you go beyond the mind, there will be meditation.

• As long as you separate yourself from life around you, you cannot reverberate with existence.

• Love is not a suffering. If you have love for someone or something, when they are with you, you can enjoy their presence, and when they are not with you, you can enjoy their absence. What you are doing in the name of love is just longing to become one with somebody.

• Spiritual process is a seeking. Religion means assuming things that you do not know.

• Do not bother about mukti (liberation), only concern yourself about your limitations, and see how to release them.

• Life is not a question of use. It is magnificent, just the way it is.

• Your body, your brain, and your whole system will function at their best only when you are joyful, exuberant, and ecstatic.

• If you know how to bring clarity to your mind,  you will see  the whole existence is open. 

• If no matter what is given to you, you can make something beautiful out of it, that is intelligence .

• Life has come from a very beautiful source. If you remain in touch with that source, everything about you will be beautiful.

• Your psychological status, your emotional nonsense- this is known terrain for you. This is something that you should deal with. Known terrain you must handle. There is unknown terrain, that’s where you need me.  

• If we are serious about saving the environment, we need to adjust our population growth to the natural resources that we have.

• Leadership is not assertion of yourself, leadership is the art of fulfilling the aspirations of everyone.

• If you think something or someone is against you, you lost your yoga, you lost your inclusiveness.

ECKHART TOLLE QUOTES FROM THE POWER OF NOW, STILLNESS SPEAKS AND A NEW EARTH

ECKHART TOLLE QUOTES FROM THE POWER OF NOW AND A NEW EARTH ON LOVE, LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

• Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head-the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it-that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind.This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking.

• When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in.

• Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

• The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation.Both are illusions.The future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.

• Ask yourself what “problem” you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?

• The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.

• “I am bored.” Who knows this?
  “I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this?
  You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

• Be there as the witnessing presence of your inner state. You don’t have to do anything. With the awareness comes transformation and freedom.

• Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.

• I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness.

• You say, “I want to know myself.” You are the I. You are the knowing. You are the consciousness through which everything is known and that cannot know itself. It is itself. There is nothing to know beyond that.

• By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form.

• If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.

• What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.

• All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.

• You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.

• Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.

• Life is the dancer and you are the dance.

• Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness.

• The past has no power over the present moment.

• Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

• The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

• Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.

• Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you.

• To love is to recognize yourself in another.

• Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.

• Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

• Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed.

• Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. 

• There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.

• Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die"  and find that there is no death.

• Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.

• Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life -and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.

• This, too, will pass.

• I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.

• To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

• Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.

• The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. 

• Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

• You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.

• When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you. That is the love that redeems the world.“Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them."

• Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

• Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.

• There are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.

• Let me say it again:
  "the present moment is all you ever have."

• True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.

• Every person carries the seed of enlightenment within.What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
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• Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.
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• Be present as the watcher of your mind of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. 
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• Death is not the opposite of life.  Life has no opposite.  The opposite of death is birth.  Life is eternal.
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• Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
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• Fear arises through identification with form, whether it be a material possession, a physical body, a social role, a self-image, a thought, or an emotion. It arises through unawareness of the formless inner dimension of consciousness or spirit, which is the essence of who you are.
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• Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

• Internal and external are ultimately one. When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world.

• If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.

• When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will.