Top 500 Rajneesh Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Surrender is not something that you can do. If you do it, it is not surrender, because the doer is there. Surrender is a great understanding that, “I am not.” Surrender is an insight that the ego exists not, that, “I am not separate.” Surrender is not an act but an understanding.”

— Rajneesh

402. “All creativity is a deep suffering, unless your creativity does not come out of the mind, but out of meditation. When it comes out of meditation, creativity is sharing the joy, sharing the blissfulness that you have. Mind has no joy – it is really a wound, very painful.”

— Rajneesh

403. “If you cannot love yourself, you don’t know even the taste of love or what love means.”

— Rajneesh

404. “When you are in anger, in passion, violent, aggressive, you feel a crystallized ego within you. Whenever you are in love, in compassion, it is not there.”

— Rajneesh

405. “Crowds create illusions.”

— Rajneesh

406. “Freedom is not to be destroyed in the name of love. Freedom is a far higher value than your so-called love.”

— Rajneesh

407. “Passing through the fire of meditation, everything that is not your authentic reality, everything that is borrowed, will be burned away.”

— Rajneesh

408. “Your real being only flowers with unconditional love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life.”

— Rajneesh

409. “First the husband tried to make the wife his possession, and once she is a possession he loses interest. There is some hidden logic in it: his whole interet was to possess; now that is finished, and he would like to try some other woman so he can again go on another trip of possesion.”

— Rajneesh

410. “The desire to rule over others, the will to power, is one of the greatest crimes that man has committed.”

— Rajneesh

411. “Drop the idea of being Extraordinary! It’s keeping you mediocre. To be Ordinary is the most extraordinary thing in the world. The Ordinary person has light in his eyes; he has become extraordinary but he has no idea of it.”

— Rajneesh

412. “The day you think you know, your death has happened – because now there will be no wonder and no joy and no surprise. Now you will live a dead life.”

— Rajneesh

413. “There is nothing ugly about death; but man, out of his fear, has made even the word, death ugly and unutterable. People don’t like to talk about it. They won’t even listen to the word death.”

— Rajneesh

414. “All that you need is just to be silent and listen to existence.”

— Rajneesh

415. “To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.”

— Rajneesh

416. “In pure awareness the mind cannot drag you down into the mud, into the gutter. In anger, in hatred, in jealousy, the mind is absolutely impotent in the face of awareness. And because the mind is absolutely impotent, your whole being is in a profound silence – the peace that passeth understanding.”

— Rajneesh

417. “When sadness comes, just sit by the side and look at it and say, “I am the watcher, I am not sadness,” and see the difference. Immediately you have cut the very root of sadness. It is no more nourished. It will die of starvation. We feed these emotions by being identified with them.”

— Rajneesh

418. “The mind is the world and the no-mind is freedom from the world. The mind is misery and no-mind is the end of misery and the beginning of ecstasy.”

— Rajneesh

419. “Meditation is a flower and compassion is its fragrance.”

— Rajneesh

420. “The perfectionist is bound to be a neurotic, he cannot enjoy life, until he is perfect. And perfection as such never happens, it is not in the nature of things. Totality is possible, perfection is not possible.”

— Rajneesh

421. “Relaxation is the point. And if you can relax with an enlightened person his enlightenment will start penetrating you, because when you are relaxed you become porous. When you are tense you are closed; when you relax he will enter.”

— Rajneesh

422. “Those otherworldly desires were just as foolish as the worldly desires.”

— Rajneesh

423. “Your absence is the presence of godliness.”

— Rajneesh

424. “When sadness comes, accept it. Listen to its song. It has something to give to you. It has a gift which no happiness can give to you, only sadness can give it.”

— Rajneesh

425. “As you walk, you simply walk. Don’t go ahead, don’t jump here and there. Mind always go ahead or lag behind. Remain with the moment.”

— Rajneesh

426. “As I see it, out of a hundred marriages ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters is love.”

— Rajneesh

427. “Living in memories is an empty gesture.”

— Rajneesh

428. “What is marriage now, or what has it ever been? – just a painful suffering, a long suffering, with false smiling faces. It has simply proved to be a misery. At the most it can be just a convenience.”

— Rajneesh

429. “Jealousy is almost like a shadow of love. If we can grow our love, it takes over the whole energy of jealousy and transforms it into love. It is an alchemical change.”

— Rajneesh

430. “Future is your projection of unfulfilled desires. The more unfulfilled you are, the bigger a future you have. The more unfulfilled is your being, the richer the dreams you have of the future. But it is just in your mind.”

— Rajneesh

431. “Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.”

— Rajneesh

432. “First you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.”

— Rajneesh

433. “All your knowledge is dust. Knowing is your purity, knowledge is dust.”

— Rajneesh

434. “If you remain always far, love will die. If you remain always near, love will die. Love can survive only in a continuous flowing relationship.”

— Rajneesh

435. “When there is nothing to desire, there is nothing to dream about either, because dreams are reflections of your desires. Dreams are reflections of your frustrations, dreams are reflections of your repressions, dreams reflect your day-life.”

— Rajneesh

436. “You cannot drop the ego. Once you start trying to drop the ego you will get in a very deep mess; you will become more and more worried and puzzled. And this is not the way to get rid of the ego. The only way to get rid of the ego is to look at it.”

— Rajneesh

437. “The mind is constantly involved in thinking, in judging, in evaluating. Its whole function seems to be to keep you involved in thoughts, which are nothing but soap bubbles – or perhaps soap bubbles have more substance to them than your thoughts.”

— Rajneesh

438. “My own observation is: lovers don’t surrender to each other, they surrender to something unknown that exists between them. They surrender to love – call it the ‘god of love’ – they both surrender to the god of love. Hence nobody’s ego is fulfilled by your surrender; both the egos disappear in love.”

— Rajneesh

439. “From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.”

— Rajneesh

440. “Once two persons are tied together freedom is lost and anger arises. When freedom is lost everything becomes ugly. Love means that freedom remains intact: marriage means that freedom has been dropped. You have bargained for permanence, for security, and you have paid for it with freedom.”

— Rajneesh

441. “Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain.”

— Rajneesh

442. “Without love a man is just a body, an empty temple without the deity. With love the deity arrives, the temple is no more empty. That’s why love gives such fullness, such deep contentment, such tremendously overflowing joy. Remain in love and let love be the door to the divine.”

— Rajneesh

443. “Today it may seem that your anger is very strong, how can meditation break it? But it breaks – it has always broken. Rock is very strong and meditation is very delicate, but this is the mystery of life – the continuity of the delicate can break the strongest and the hardest.”

— Rajneesh

444. “The world is against individuality. It is against your being just your natural self. It wants you just to be a robot, and because you have agreed to be a robot you are in trouble. You are not a robot.”

— Rajneesh

445. “It is impossible to pursue happiness. Nobody has ever pursued it. One has to wait for it. And it is not a right at all. No law court can force you to be happy or force happiness to be with you. No government violence is capable of making you happy. No power can make you happy...”

— Rajneesh

446. “You don’t know what beauty is. You use the word, certainly, but your word is empty. Beauty is known only by one who has known the inner beauty, one who has known the inner flower opening. Then whenever a flower is seen, it reminds you of your inner beauty.”

— Rajneesh

447. “Misery has only one meaning, that things are not fitting with your desires – and things never fit with your desires, they cannot. Things simply go on following their nature.”

— Rajneesh

448. “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.”

— Rajneesh

449. “All of the religions are looking after the poor. At least leave me alone to look after the rich. I am the rich man’s guru.”

— Rajneesh

450. “There is no failure in life. It all depends how you take things. If you are desiring too much – you want to reach too high, and you cannot – then there is frustration and failure. But if you are not desiring anything and you are perfectly happy wherever you are, life is moment-to-moment victory.”

— Rajneesh