This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
By thinking you cannot decide. It is not a question of deciding as a logical conclusion, it is a question of choiceless awareness. You need a mind without thoughts. In other words, you need a no-mind, just a pure silence, so you can see directly into things. And out of that clarity will come the choice on its own; you are not choosing. You will act just as a buddha acts. Your action will have beauty, your action will have truth, your action will have the fragrance of the divine. There is no need for you to choose.
Action | Choice | Mind | Need | Question | Thinking | Will |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Spirituality is not a question of morality, it is a question of vision. Spirituality is not the practising of virtues -- because if you practise a virtue it is no longer a virtue. A practised virtue is a dead thing, a dead weight. Virtue is virtue only when it is spontaneous; virtue is virtue only when it is natural, unpractised -- when it comes out of your vision, out of your awareness, out of your understanding.
Question | Spirituality | Virtue | Virtue |
The phenomenon of the observer and the observed is not a dual process, but a single one; and only in experiencing the fact of this unitary process is there freedom from desire, from conflict. The question of how to experience this fact should never arise. It must happen; and it happens only when there is alertness and passive awareness. You cannot know the actual experience of meeting a poisonous snake by imagining or speculating about it while sitting comfortably in your room. To meet the snake you must venture out beyond the paved streets and artificial lights.
Experience | Freedom | Question |
All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Authority | Destroy | Evil | Man | Question | Thought | Teacher | Thought |
The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.
We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.
Conquest | Government | Question | Will | World | Government |
Jean Monnet, fully Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet
Everybody is ambitious. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or ambitious to do.
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A truth in ethics is a conclusion backed by reasons. The “correct” answer to a moral question is simply the answer that has the weight of reason on its side. Such truths are objective in the sense that they are true independently of what we might want or think. We cannot make something good or bad just by wishing it to be so because we cannot merely will that the weight of reason be on its side or against it. And this also explains our fallibility: We can be wrong about what is good or bad because we can be wrong about what reason commends.
Ethics | Good | Question | Reason | Sense | Truth | Will | Wrong | Truths |
The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.
It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture
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The question is not how we can be righteous, but how, though unrighteous and unworthy, we can be considered as righteous.
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The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?"
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Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be. The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that might prove fatal, that may end in disaster. The pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
The question is not how certain is that truth out there. The question is what does it mean, and above all, what does it mean to me.
The market tends to pay as a wage what an individual laborer is worth. But the case last studied suggests the question how accurately the law operates in practice. May it not be an honest law, but be so vitiated in its working as to give a dishonest result?
Individual | Law | Question |
Truth is an affair of history and is affected by all the relativities of history. Truth is an affair of the human subject. Truth, therefore, is an affair of experience. The question of truth as possessed brings into the whole problem the question the human person who must personally possess truth... And in the perception of truth the human intelligence has a function that must be conceived as being creative. This is the truth in the philosophical error of idealism. Somehow the mind creates truth in a sense. There is a truth here as there is in all errors.
Error | History | Intelligence | Mind | Perception | Question | Truth |