We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.
RajneeshRead
But we are not interested in death at all: rather, we escape the facts, we are continuously escaping the facts. Death is there, and every moment we are dying. Death is not something far away, it is here and now: we are dying. But while we are dying we go on being concerned about life. This concern with life, this over concern with life, is just an escape, just a fear. Death is there, deep inside - growing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on humanity's avoidance of the reality of death and illustrates how this avoidance affects our perception of life.
Rajneesh suggests that our persistent focus on life and our avoidance of contemplating death lead to an unhealthy distraction. By emphasizing our concern with life, we often neglect to acknowledge the inescapable presence of death in our existence. This fixation and fear of death may prevent us from truly living and understanding our reality, as death fundamentally influences our lives at every moment.
Themes
DeathLifeFearExistenceEscape
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of life and death.
More from Rajneesh
All quotes →The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
RajneeshRead
Only those persons who have lived, really lived, are ready, welcoming, receptive, thankful to death. Then death is not the enemy. Then death becomes the fulfillment.
RajneeshRead
Creativity has two possibilities. One is that it arises out of your silence, love, understanding, your clarity of vision, your intimate friendliness with existence - then creativity is healthy. But if it does not arise out of meditation, out of silence and peace and understanding and love, then there is a danger. It may be arising out of your confused mind. It may be arising out of your insanity.
RajneeshRead
There is no separate art of life. If you know how to allow poetry, if you know how to allow dance, if you know how to allow love - if you know how to ALLOW, then you know the art of life. In the allowing, in the let-go, in the surrender, is the art of life. How not to be and to let God be - that is the only art of life.
RajneeshRead
Love is not a relationship, love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not "in love", one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love – but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
RajneeshRead
Similar quotes
But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
Paul AusterRead
Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.
Ayn RandRead
This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.
David Henry HwangRead
When two or more people agree on an issue, I form on the other side.
Bill HicksRead
Holiness is a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in the arms of God, aware of our weakness, and confident - in the most audacious way - in His Fatherly goodness.
Therese Of LisieuxRead
Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It's not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.
Michel FoucaultRead