Osho quotes on Desires

Osho Quotes on Desires

• Desire means the way to go out; desire is the path that leads you out. If your mind is still desiring, you cannot move within.

• Needs can be fulfilled, desires never. Needs are natural, desires are perverted.

• 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.

• Buddha says: Life should be simple, not complex. Life should be based on needs, not on desires. Needs are perfectly okay: you need food, you need clothes, you need a shelter, you need love, you need relationship. Perfectly good, nothing wrong in it. Needs can be fulfilled; desires are basically unfulfillable. Desires create complexity. They create complexity because they can never be fulfilled. You go on and on working hard for them, and they remain unfulfilled, and you remain empty.

• The more desires you have, the more misery you will create for yourself. Misery is a consequence of desiring -- and you go on desiring. In fact, you think that if your desires are fulfilled your miseries will disappear. In the first place they are never fulfilled; in the second place, if they are fulfilled, nothing is fulfilled by their fulfillment. You remain as empty as you have always been -- or even more, because up to now you were occupied with a certain desire; now even that is fulfilled. A deep deep emptiness comes to you.

• You have to take the responsibility totally, that it is you who decides either to be in misery or to be in blessing. If you want misery, have more desires. If you want a blissfulness, then learn the art -- even for few moments -- of being desireless, and you will be surprised. Even for a few moments, if you are desireless, all anguish, all anxiety disappears. And you are so contented, so fulfilled, that you cannot ask for more. Your blessing is so much that you can only say that you bless the whole existence. Still it will be there. It is so much; it is overflowing.

• Ego brings unnatural desires in you; it drives you crazy. Life is simple, but to be simple one has to be purposeless. Any goal, and you can`t be simple. Any goal and you can`t be herenow. Any goal and the desire will rock you. Any goal, and you are on the way, again moving -- you cannot enjoy this moment, the grace of this moment, the benediction of herenow.

• See what your misery is, what desires are causing it, and why you are clinging to those desires. And it is not for the first time that you are clinging to those desires; this has been the pattern of your whole life and you have not arrived anywhere. You go on in circles, you never come to any real growth. You remain childish, stupid. And you are born with the intelligence that can make you a buddha, but it is lost in unnecessary things.

• If you have desires, try to look -- are those desires the cause of your misery? Nobody wants misery, but nobody is willing to drop the desires -- and they are together, they cannot be separated. This is one of the greatest insights that has come from all the enlightened people in the world -- that desire is the root of all misery, and desirelessness is the cause of all that is beautiful and blissful.

• And desires are never here and now -- they are non-existential. They are just mental, in the mind. And they cannot be fulfilled because their very nature is to move into the future.

• 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.

• Your desires are immense, almost infinite. Because of your desires life becomes a competition, and wherever there is competition, there is anxiety and angst; and at the end everybody is aware deep down there is death.

• That is Buddha`s meaning of nirvana: to be free from life and death, to be free from desire. The moment you are free from all desires... remember, I repeat, ALL desires. The so-called religious, spiritual desires are included in it, nothing is excluded. All desires have to be dropped because every desire brings frustration, misery, boredom. If you succeed it brings boredom; if you fail it brings despair. If you are after money there are only two possibilities: either you will fail or you will succeed. If you succeed you will be bored with money.

• The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children -- their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

• Every child is being destroyed by his own people. They don`t know consciously what they are doing. Parents are projecting their own unfulfilled desires onto their children. The father wanted to be a doctor but could not; he ended up being something else. He could not pass the examinations and became just a chemist, but he imposes the desire to become a doctor onto his son. He sends him to school with great hope that his child will achieve what he could not achieve. He is doing it all out of his unconscious love, but unconscious love is not love -- it is blind. With all good intentions, it does harm. The child who is being forced to become a doctor, if he was left alone to grow according to his own nature... one never knows what kind of beauty or joy, what kind of individuality, he would have contributed to the world.
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• Why do you dream? -- because there are so many desires unfulfilled, and to live with unfulfilled desires is painful. In dream you try to fulfill them; in dream you create a false feeling of fulfillment. Hence your dreams show much about you: what your desires are, what you want to become. But if you want to become anything in life, you are asleep.