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
Laughter. Yes, laughter is the Zen attitude towards death and towards life too, because life and death are not separate. Whatsoever is your attitude towards life will be your attitude towards death, because death comes as the ultimate flowering of life. Life exists for death. Life exists through death. Without death there will be no life at all. Death is not the end but the culmination, the crescendo. Death is not the enemy it is the friend. It makes life possible.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Laughter signifies a balanced perspective on life and death, showing they are interconnected.
This quote by Rajneesh emphasizes the intrinsic relationship between life and death, suggesting that our approach to one mirrors our approach to the other. By accepting death as a natural part of life, we can appreciate life's beauty more fully and recognize that death is not an end, but rather an essential component of the life cycle that adds depth and meaning to our existence.
Themes
LaughterLifeDeathAttitudeZenPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a speech about coping with loss during a memorial service.
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
A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones
Charles DarwinRead
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in "On Liberty." The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
Milton FriedmanRead
At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.
Gore VidalRead
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
William PennRead
The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.
James MadisonRead
Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieRead