“Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.” ~ Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
“Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.” ~ Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
“Man creates what he is, man creates himself. The meaning has to be created. You have to sing your meaning, you have to dance your meaning, you have to paint your meaning, you have to live it. Through living, it will arise; through dancing, it will start penetrating your being. Through singing, it will come to you. It is not like a rock just lying there to be found, it has to bloom in your being.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 227)
“People wonder why there seems to be no meaning in life. Meaning does not exist a priori. There is no meaning existing in life; one has to create it. Only if you create it will you discover it. It has to be invented first. It is not lying there like a rock, it has to be created like a song. It is not a thing, it is significance that you bring through your consciousness.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 221)
“You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.” ~ Joel Osteen
“There are very few joys in life greater than spontaneity. Spontaneity means to be in the moment; it means acting out of your awareness, not acting according to your old conditionings.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 211)
“A man of understanding, a man who understands himself and others, always feels compassion. Even if somebody is an enemy you have compassion toward him because a man of understanding can understand the viewpoint of the other also. He knows why the other feels as he feels, he knows why the other is angry, because he knows his own self, and in knowing that, he has known all others.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 206)
“Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is not obedience to others: their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. And they are ready to risk anything for it.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 202)
“Being is so significant that it is irreplaceable. You are just yourself. Do something that comes out of you – not to assert, but to express! Sing your song, dance your dance, rejoice in being whatever nature has chosen you to be.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 180)
“The desire to rule over others, the will to power, is one of the greatest crimes that man has committed.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 177)
“The mediocre mind has no capacity for understanding. It is stuck somewhere near thirteen years in its mental age, or even below it. The person may be forty, fifty, seventy years old – that does not matter, that is the physical age. He has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. You should note the distinction. Growing old, every animal does. Growing up, only a few human beings manage.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 177)
“Two identical things do not exist at all, so there is no need to be ‘somebody.’ You just be yourself, and suddenly you are unique, incomparable. That’s why I say that this is a paradox: those who search fail, and those who don’t bother, suddenly attain.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 171)
“You don’t feel empty because you don’t have much money. You feel empty because you have not yet encountered your real self, you have not come to your authentic individuality. Individuality makes you a light unto yourself.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 159) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises – because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 155)