Osho Quotes on Silence

1. We are very much enclosed in our own psychology, and we project that psychology all around. A man of silence finds this whole world is full of silence. Even the sounds only deepen the silence. And a man full of noise never becomes aware of the immense silences in the night. It all depends on you. Your world is nothing but you, projected.
2. Become silent. In your silence, all questions will disappear. And the dance will begin, whatever the figure! Because as far as your inner being is concerned, it has no figure; it is just a luminous flame which can dance. It has been eternally there, repressed by you. You are the greatest enemy of yourself. My effort is to turn you into the greatest friend of yourself.
3. A man of silence moves with a certain field of energy around him, and if you are receptive, his vibe starts touching your heart.
4. In meditation, silence comes on its own accord. You simply go on watching the mind without any control, without any repression, and silence comes suddenly just like a breeze, and with the silence, the fragrance of the flowers — that is your blissfulness; it is your own fragrance which you were not capable of knowing because there was so much noise.
5. Ask, do everything that is possible, and then finally — tired, exhausted — you need to relax; you even let go of the idea of enlightenment, it is all futile. In this silence, when there is no desire stirring your mind, you suddenly find you are the enlightened one. That enlightenment was not somewhere else, it was within you. But it needed utter silence, no desire.
6. Enlightenment as such is already there. You are a buddha, but you are not aware of it. How to make you aware of it? Down the ages, this has been the way, and I don’t see there is any other possibility. You will become aware of it only in utter silence. But the utter silence, a state of no-mind, a pure space, needs all your desires to be exhausted.
7. Being in the presence of a master, silence happens on its own accord. Just as in the deep Himalayas, where the snow is eternal and the silence almost ancient… just sitting there under a tree, you start feeling, falling in tune with the immensity that surrounds you. To be in the presence of the master is even more deep-going.
8. Your inner being can be reflected only in a mirror without any ripples. No mind — absolute silence of all thoughts, absence of the mind completely — becomes the mirror without any ripples, without even a single fluttering of thought. And suddenly, the explosion: you have become aware for the first time of your own being.
9. What is the point of a beautiful sunrise if you are asleep? What is the beauty of a rose if you are asleep? Mind is your sleep, concentrated or not. Meditation is your awakening. The moment you awake, sleep disappears and with it all the dreams, all the projections, all expectations, all desires. Suddenly you are in a state of desirelessness, non-ambition, unfathomable silence. And only in this silence, blossoms flower in your being. Only in this silence the lotuses open their petals.
10. Truth is not something that comes from outside, it arises out of the intensity of your silence. In fact, the intensity of your silence, a great silence crystallized, is truth. Truth is not something other than silence. A small silence becomes the door to greater silences, and finally, the silence itself becomes so condensed — Gurdjieff used to call it the crystallization — you find yourself. In that very finding you have found the truth. Then life is a sheer joy, a song, a dance, a celebration.
11. If you really want to express the truth, don’t say anything about it, just leave the gap. Let people hear without your saying anything. That’s the only way truth has always been transferred — from one silent heart to another silent heart. In utter silence is the only possibility to meet, to merge, to share.
12. Silence is all that is needed, and everything else follows on its own accord.
13. Meditation is an effort to bring light and to bring joy and to bring silence and to bring blissfulness, and out of this beautiful world of meditation it is impossible for you to do anything wrong. So I have changed it completely. Religions were insisting on action; my insistence is on consciousness, and consciousness can grow only in silence. Silence is the right soil for consciousness. When you are noisy you cannot be very alert and conscious. When you are conscious and alert, you cannot be noisy — they cannot co-exist.
14. Grace comes as a flowering of your being. The moment your meditation reaches to the deepest core, to the very center of the cyclone, a tremendous silence, peace and blissfulness arise within you. Grace is the total effect of all these qualities: silence, peace, love, compassion, blissfulness, ecstasy. When these things arise in you, their flame, their fire starts radiating from your physical body. They are so much they start overflowing. That overflowing of your inner ecstasy is what can be defined as grace.
15. Impatience makes you ugly. Impatience is a disturbance in your meditation. Learn to wait. Be patient and trust that existence will give you whatever you are ready for. All that you have to do is to go on deeper in meditation, beyond mind into silence. No thoughts, no emotions, no moods, just a silent watchfulness and waiting for whatever existence finds you ready for.

Osho Quotes on Silence

1. Mind means the turmoil, the illness, the disease; mind means the tense, the anguished state. The mind cannot be silent; when there is silence there is no mind. When silence comes, mind disappears; when mind is there, silence is no more. So there cannot be any silent mind, just as there cannot be any healthy disease.
2. Silence is the inner health; mind is the inner disease, inner disturbance.
3. To be total is a basic thing for any seeker, for anyone in search of silence and truth.
4. What is the difference between a real silence and a false silence? A false silence is always forced; through effort it is achieved. It is not spontaneous, it has not happened to you. You have made it happen. You are sitting silently and there is much inner turmoil. You suppress it and then you cannot laugh. You will become sad because laughter will be dangerous — if you laugh you will lose silence, because in laughter you cannot suppress. Laughter is against suppression. If you want to suppress you should not laugh; if you laugh everything will come out. The real will come out in laughter, and the unreal will be lost. So whenever you see a saint sad, know well the silence is false. He cannot laugh, he cannot enjoy, because he is afraid. If he laughs everything will be broken, the suppression will come out, and then he will not be able to suppress.
5. Nothing can disturb if real silence has happened. Then everything helps it to grow. If you are really silent you can sit in a market, and even the market cannot disturb it. Rather, you feed on the noise of the market and that noise becomes more silence in you. Really, to feel silence a market is needed — because if you have real silence, then the market becomes the background and the silence becomes perfect in contrast. You can feel the inner silence bubbling against the market.
6. Meditation doesn’t lead you to silence; meditation only creates the situation in which the silence happens. And this should be the criterion — that whenever silence happens laughter will come into your life. A vital celebration will happen all around. You will not become sad, you will not become depressed, you will not escape from the world. You will be here in this world, but taking the whole thing as a game, enjoying the whole thing as a beautiful game, a big drama, no longer serious about it. Seriousness is a disease.
7. Your enlightenment is perfect only when silence has come to be a celebration. Hence my insistence that after you meditate you must celebrate. After you have been silent you must enjoy it, you must have a thanksgiving. A deep gratitude must be shown towards the whole just for the opportunity that you are, that you can meditate, that you can be silent, that you can laugh.
8. THINKING cannot be stopped. Not that it does not stop, but it cannot be stopped. It stops of its own accord. This distinction has to be understood, otherwise you can go mad chasing your mind. No-mind does not arise by stopping thinking. When the thinking is no more, no-mind is. The very effort to stop will create more anxiety, it will create conflict, it will make you split. You will be in a constant turmoil within. This is not going to help. And even if you succeed in stopping it forcibly for a few moments, it is not an achievement at all — because those few moments will be almost dead, they will not be alive. You may feel a sort of stillness, but not silence, because a forced stillness is not silence. Underneath it, deep in the unconscious, the repressed mind goes on working.
9. When silence happens in the marketplace then it is true, then it is yours — now nobody can take it away. Now no distraction can be a distraction to you. You can remain anywhere; whatsoever the situation, your silence will remain there as a deep substratum to your being. It is inner.
10. If you escape to the Himalayas you will start feeling a little still, but at the same time a little stupid also. You will start feeling more silent, but that silence belongs to the Himalayas, not to you. Come back and your silence will be left behind — you will come alone. And back in the world you will be even more disturbed than before, because you will have become more vulnerable, soft. And you will come with a prejudice, with this idea that you have attained to silence. You will have become more egoistic. That’s why people who have escaped to the monasteries become afraid of coming back to the world. The world is the test. The world is the criterion. And it is easier to be in the world and, by and by, grow into a silence, then the Himalayan silence comes into your being. You don’t go to the Himalayas: the Himalayas themselves come to you. Then it is something of your own, then you are the master of it.
11. Words are figures; silence is the background. Words come and go; silence remains. When you were born you were born as a silence — just intervals and intervals, gaps and gaps. Infinite emptiness you came with, unbounded emptiness you brought with you in life — then you started collecting words.
12. Mind means words; self means silence. Mind is nothing but all the words that you have accumulated; silence is that which has always been with you, it is not an accumulation. That is the meaning of self. It is your intrinsic quality. On the background of silence you go on accumulating words, and the words in total are known as the mind. Silence is meditation. It is a question of changing the gestalt, shifting the attention from words into silence — which is always there.
13. Only silence is beyond negation and affirmation; only silence is neither atheistic nor theistic; only silence is religious; only silence is sacred.
14. A master is to help you to go to your inner emptiness, the inner silence, the inner temple; and the master has to devise methods. Only zen masters beat; sometimes they throw a person out of the window, or they jump on him. Because you have become so false, such drastic methods are needed.
15. A silence is needed before death, before life, before love. If you love a person you sit silently with the person. You would not like to chatter, you would like to just hold their hand and live and be silent in that moment. If you chatter, that means you are avoiding the person — love is not really there. If you love life, chattering will drop, because every moment is so filled with life that there is no way, no space to chatter. Each moment life is flooding you so vitally — where is the time to gossip and chatter? Each moment you live totally, mind becomes silent. Eat, and eat so totally — because life is entering you through food — that mind becomes silent. Drink, and drink totally: life is entering through water, it will quench your thirst; move with it as it touches your thirst, as the thirst disappears. Be silent and watch. How can you chatter when you are drinking a cup of tea? Warm life is flowing within you. Be filled with it. Be respectful.