If you ask my vision of love...it is no more a question of dialectics, opposition. Men and women are different and complimentary. Man alone is half, so is woman. Only together, in a deep feeling of oneness, they feel for the first time totality, perfection.

Osho

Without Love, Life Has no Poetry in it

"A greater fear than death grips you whenever you are in love. That's why love has disappeared from the world. Rarely, very rarely does the phenomenon happen that love descends. What you call love is just a false coin: you have invented it because it is so difficult to live without love. It is difficult because without love, life carries no meaning; it is meaningless. Without love, life has no poetry in it. Without love, the tree exists but never flowers. Without love, you cannot dance, you cannot celebrate, you cannot feel grateful, you cannot pray. Without love, temples are just ordinary houses; with love an ordinary house is transformed, transfigured into a temple. Without love you remain just possibilities – empty gestures. With love, for the first time you become substantial. With love, for the first time, the soul arises in you. The ego drops but the soul arises... 

"Moving towards love is moving towards an abyss. One starts wavering, one feels dizzy. Go to a height in the Himalayas and look down at the valley; that valley is no-thing. When you look down at the valley of love, a tremendous fear grips you. You are almost paralyzed: you cannot run away, you cannot take the jump. You simply tremble in infinite fear. What to do? Going back is not possible because love attracts: love calls your depth, love calls your future, love calls your potentiality; love gives you a glimpse of what you can be. You cannot run away from it, and you cannot jump because the cost is too high. You will have to drop yourself – all that you have been thinking yourself to be – the image, the past, the identity. 

"But I tell you, the cost only seems to be too much before the jump. Once you take the jump…then you will know that whatsoever you have given up is nothing, and what you have attained is infinitely valuable. Let me tell you a paradox: love demands that you drop that which you don't have, and love offers you that which you already have. Love wants you to get rid of that which you don't have."

Osho, Come Follow to You

Love is our deepest longing. Just as the body needs food the soul needs love — it is nourishment, spiritual nourishment. Without the food, air and water, the body will deteriorate; without love the soul starts shrinking. And everybody is living with a very small soul for the simple reason that they have not loved.

And why have they not loved? If you enquire into the question you will be surprised, because for the whole of their life everybody is trying to get love. But people are trying to get, not to give, and the law of love is that you get only when you give. Giving comes first, getting is only a consequence.

And people are asking the impossible; they want first: “Give me love.” Everybody, in a thousand and one ways, is saying “Give me love”, but love comes only when you give; you cannot demand it. Hence the whole world is suffering; everybody is full of love, the world can become a very loving place, but it is just the opposite of it — full of hatred, anger, rage, violence, destruction, for the simple reason that everybody is full of love and nobody is giving. They are asking and demanding and trying to force and snatch away.

Now, love is not a thing that you can force, love is not a thing that you can possess, love is not a thing that can be snatched away in any way. It is beautiful only, alive only, when it is given without any demand on your part, when it comes of its own accord. And it comes on its own accord whenever you give; in fact it comes a thousandfold.

So give as much love as possible and you will get so much in return that you will not be able to believe it in the beginning. It is absolutely unbelievable that the whole existence starts pouring love towards you.

You just show the gesture of giving, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions, no expectations, let your joy be in the giving itself — love for love’s sake — and you will be in for a great surprise: thousands of windows suddenly open and the sun and the wind and the rain and the whole existence starts flowing towards you. It floods you, and that flooded life is the life of a buddha, that life is the goal of a sannyasin.

Osho

The First Ripple of Love Has to Be Around Yourself

"The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you. 

"It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one's body, one has to love one's soul, one has to love one's totality. 

"And this is natural; otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative more prayerful than the person who does not love himself. 

"If you don't love your house you will not clean it; if you don't love your house you will not paint it; if you don't love you will not surround it with a beautiful garden with a lotus pond. If you love yourself you will create a garden around yourself. You will try to grow your potential, you will try to bring out all that is in you to be expressed. If you love, you will go on showering yourself, you will go on nourishing yourself. 

"And if you love yourself you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. If you cannot even love yourself, who else is going to take the trouble? And the person who does not love himself cannot remain neutral. Remember, in life there is no neutrality." 

Osho, The Secret

Drop hesitations. People come to me and they say they want to love, they hesitate; they want to meditate, but they hesitate; they would like to dance, but they hesitate. If this hesitation is there and you go on feeding it, you will miss your whole life. It is time: drop it! And nothing else is to be done: just become aware that this is just the way you have been brought up, that's all. 

Osho

I cannot promise you certainty if you drop the mind. I can promise you only one thing, that you will be clear. There will be clarity, transparency, you will be able to see things as they are. You will be neither confused nor certain. Certainty and confusion are two sides of the same coin.

Osho

You become more divine as you become more creative. all the religions of the world have said: God is the Creator. I don't know whether He is the Creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So He must be the Creator because people who have been creative have been closest to Him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it – whatsoever it is irrelevant of the fact of what it is. 

Osho

One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don't leave any footprints. You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.

Osho

How can love impose ideals on anyone? Love simply accepts you as you are; there is no need to be somebody else. I call a place holy only where love is unconditional, shared without asking anything in return, not even in a subtle way.

Love is not surrender. Love does not ask you to surrender. Love does not ask for anything. Love simply gives. And the miracle is, that when you give out of love the whole existence returns it a thousandfold, as if, from all over around you, roses start showering on you. You cannot imagine, cannot conceive of it, unless you experience it. But give it a try. You will not be losing anything.

Love is not something like a commodity, that if you give it you will have less of it. It is not money, that you had ten dollars and five you have given; now you have only five dollars left. Love is not a commodity. It is not a quantity; it is a quality. Give it, and you will be surprised that from unknown sources, from everywhere, love is flowing towards you. Give it unconditionally, and once you have known the taste and the joy of giving unconditionally, you will also know that the existence is very generous.

Osho