Osho Quotes on Ambition

1. Man is not destroyed by other small things — marijuana, LSD, etcetera — he is destroyed by something far deeper. Ambition is the most poisonous thing. We are unconscious. So, unless we become very aware of our inner poisons we will not be able to transform our beings from darkness into light. We will remain dark holes — and we have the capacity to become eternal light.
2. The whole point is to understand that the future is not. The future is created by the ambitious mind. The future is not part of time. It is part of ambition. Because ambition needs space to move. You cannot fulfill ambition now. You can fulfill life now, but not ambition. Ambition is against life, antilife.
3. What is the root of your misery? The root is your ambition, desiring. One wants to be this and that, one wants to possess this and that, one wants to be somebody, one wants to be significant.
4. The moment you have put your mind aside – mind means ambition, the ego trip of being this and that – the moment you have put the whole mind aside, a great light explodes in you and you are enlightened. This is satori. It does not come from the outside: you are not delivered by somebody else, you are delivered by your own being, by your own nature.
5. The man of Zen is absolutely conscious — no greed, no anger, no jealousy, no ambition. These are all intoxicants, these are all drugs: they go on keeping you sleepy. It is a miracle how you manage your life with so many poisons running in your bloodstream, in your very being. That is the only difference; otherwise, from the outside, you will not know.
6. What is the point of becoming ambitious? Ambition means I have to be superior, I have to prove that I am superior to others. Now for this you have to lose your intelligence, you have to become stupid. That’s why politicians are utterly stupid people, they can’t be otherwise. They are all bananas, and rotten bananas at that!
7. Ambition starts in such a way that you never become aware what poison it contains in it. The bottle of ambition contains pure poison, but the label is not that of poison: the label says it is pure nectar.
8. Both meet in you — time and eternity. Now it is for you to decide. If you move in ambition, you will move in time; and death exists in time. If you move in desire, you will move in time; and death exists in time. If you hanker for the ego, you will move in time. Death, ego, desire, ambition, they all are part of the horizontal line. If you start digging in the moment and move vertically, you become a nonego, you become desireless, you become nonambitious. But suddenly you are aflame with life, you are an intense energy of life. God has taken possession of you. Move vertically, and all miserliness disappears.
9. All your educational systems and all your cultural beliefs, force you to be ambitious, to be somebody. But to be somebody means creating anxieties in a silent pool, ripples and waves. The greater the ambition, the more tidal is the wave of anxiety. You can become almost insane desiring. Trying to be somebody, you are trying the impossible, because basically you are nobody. Zen has an absolutely unique perception into the nothingness of everyone. It does not teach you any ambition, it does not teach you to be someone else. It simply wants you to know that in the deepest part of your being you are still nothing, you are still carrying the original purity which is not even contaminated by an idea of “I.”
10. Why should you want to become somebody else? Why? This competition, this ambition, brings ego in. This comparison is egoistic. ‘Somebody is wise so I should become wise.’ Why? Let somebody be wise, that is his destiny. What is wrong in being the way you are? Then there is variety and there is richness in life because of the variety.
11. What is politics? Politics is ambition, politics is ego, politics is aggression, politics is violence, politics is an ego-trip. How can a religious person be political? He can pretend that he is religious but he cannot be religious. And how can a political person be religious? He can pretend that he is religious but he cannot be religious. These two thugs cannot go together because to be religious one has to drop ambition. And if you drop ambition politics disappears. To be religious one has to drop the ego, and when you drop the ego, politics is dropped. A religious person has to be without any ego whatsoever.
12. That’s what always happens to ambition. When you are nearing to the end, suddenly you recognize that one thing is very basically missing — somebody is still ahead of you. And ambition is very violent. Even if it is your Master, you can kill him. Ambition is violence. An ambitious man can never ke non-violent. An ambitious man can never love. Not even his own Master is safe! An ambitious man is a dangerous man. Ambition is poison. It poisons you.
13. Let it be remembered always: you cannot become non-violent if there is still ambition — any kind of ambition will never allow you compassion. How can you be compassionate if there is ambition? You have still to fight, still to make your way.
14. Zen has a different approach. It says: Be in the life — life is not wrong. If something is wrong it is wrong in your vision. Your eyes are clouded, your mirror of consciousness is dusty. Clean it! Create more clarity. If competitiveness disappears, you are in the world and yet you are not in the world. If ambition disappears, then there is no world left. But how the ambition and the competition can disappear? We go on creating new ways. Somebody is trying to have more money than you and somebody else is trying to be more virtuous than you. What is the difference? Somebody is trying to be more knowledgeable than you, somebody else is trying to have more character than you. It is the same desire, the same dreaming, the same sleepiness. And people go on and on in their dreaming. Their dreams change, but they never wake up.

Osho Quotes on Ambition

1. If you are ambitious, then your mind is bound to remain restless. If you want peace, then the first requirement is to drop all ambition. Unless you drop ambition you cannot be at ease, at peace, you cannot be relaxed.
2. Just watch people who have succeeded in the world and you will drop the idea of success. Nothing fails like success. Although you have been told that nothing succeeds like success, I say to you that nothing fails like success. Happiness has nothing to do with success, happiness has nothing to do with ambition, happiness has nothing to do with money, power, prestige. It is a totally different dimension.
3. To live without meditation is to be foolish, because whatsoever you do then is going to be wrong. You cannot do right without meditation because right only grows in the soil of meditation. In the soil of the mind ambitions, desires arise. And when there is ambition there is competition, and when there is competition you are not a friend to others. You are an enemy and others are your enemies. The competitive mind lives in an inimical way, lives in hatred, lives in jealousy; its whole function is out of jealousy. And because of this kind of life man suffers, he remains in misery.
4. Become still — not a forced stillness, not a practiced and cultivated stillness — become still naturally. Understanding the futility of desire, seeing the absolute absurdity of ambition, become still — through understanding, not through practice.
5. How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier. Ambition means an ego trip: “I want to be this, I want to be that — more money, more power, more prestige.” But remember, Buddha says: THE WINNER SOWS HATRED BECAUSE THE LOSER SUFFERS. LET GO OF WINNING AND LOSING AND FIND JOY. If you want to find joy, forget about winning and losing. Life is a play, a game. Play it beautifully, forget all about losing and winning. The real sportsman’s spirit is not that of winning or losing, it is not his real question. He enjoys playing; that is the real player. If you are playing to win, you will play with tension, anxiety. You are not concerned with the play itself, its joy and its mystery; you are more concerned with the outcome. This is not the right way to live in the world.
6. The more meditative you become, the less ambitious you will be. There is no question of fulfilling ambitions; ambition will start disappearing from your consciousness.
7. This moment is all. Buddha insists very much: Live in the moment. And desire does not allow you to live in the moment. And you go on repeating the same things, you move in circles. Just watch your life, look back. You have been moving in circles: the same anger, the same sex, the same greed, the same ambition, the same postponement and the same desiring mind. When are you going to wake up?
8. What is enlightenment? — the insight that desire is futile, that ambition is illness. Then suddenly you are thrown back to the present moment. To be in the present is to be enlightened. To be now and to be here is to be enlightened.
9. Mind is politics, because mind is ambitious and ambition is the root of politics. If you are ambitious you are political. Your ambition may take the form of religion, but the politics is there. Then you are competing with other saints.
10. Man cannot live without politics, because of the mind. You are brought up, you are trained to be political. Every child is poisoned from the very beginning, poisoned by ambition. We teach children to be ambitious: be somebody in the world, be somebody special, somebody superior, defeat others! We give the idea to every child that life is a struggle and only the fittest survive. Whether you survive by right or wrong means, that is not important.
11. This is the case with you in so many lives. You have lived the same kind of life again and again — the same desire, the same greed, the same ambition — and each time you were frustrated, but again you are ready to become a victim. It is exactly like dreams.
12. Buddha introduced the idea that young people should become sannyasins. Then it is something significant. When a young person goes beyond sex, when a young person goes beyond desires, when a young person goes beyond greed, ambition, the longing to be powerful, the ambition to be famous, then it is something tremendously meaningful, significant. Remember one thing: when you are young you have energies. Those energies can take you to hell and those same energies can take you to heaven. Energies are neutral; it depends on you how you use them.
13. We are very much afraid, and the fear arises because we have believed, we have been told again and again, hypnotized to believe in the ego. This whole social structure up to now, hitherto, has been propounding an egoistic life attitude. Then fear, then greed, then ambition, are natural. And ego is being taught to every child; his ego is strengthened so that you can make him ambitious. Out of ambition arises politics. Ego is created so that you can make him afraid. Out of fear arises religion — the so-called religion.
14. Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition. Be the first! Wherever you are, whatsoever you are doing: be the first! — as if being the first has something divine about it. By what means you become the first is irrelevant. By right means or wrong means, succeed! As if success in itself has become equivalent to life, synonymous with life. Life has nothing to do with success. Success keeps you rushing towards the future and that becomes your intoxicant. Hoping, hoping for the tomorrow, wasting that which you have or that which you don’t have and will never have.