In fact, only a person who is capable of being alone is capable of love. Lonely persons cannot love. Their need is so much that they cling—how can they love? Lonely persons cannot love, they can only exploit. Lonely persons pretend to love; deep down they want to get love. They don’t have it to give, they have nothing to give. Only a person who kno

Love arises out of aloneness. Aloneness makes you overfull, love receives your gifts. Love empties you so that you can become full again. Whenever you are emptied by love, aloneness is there to nourish you, to integrate you.

Your first and most primary step toward finding the meaning and significance of life is to enter into your aloneness. It is your temple; it is where your God lives, and you cannot find this temple anywhere else.

Ego and love cannot exist together. They are like light and darkness: when light comes, darkness disappears. If you love yourself you will be surprised—self-love means the self disappears. In self-love there is no self ever found. That is the paradox: Self-love is utterly selfless. It is not selfish—because whenever there is light there is no darkn

It is as if we are trying to fly in the sky with one wing. A few people have the wing of love and a few people have the wing of freedom—both are incapable of flying. Both wings are needed.

When you don’t need a person at all, when you are totally sufficient unto yourself, when you can be alone and tremendously happy and ecstatic, then love is possible. But then, too, you cannot be certain whether the other’s love is real or not—you can be certain about only one thing: whether your love is real. How can you be certain about the other?

You can be alone in the marketplace. It is simply a question of being aware, alert, watchful, remembering that you are only your watchfulness. Then you are alone wherever you are. You may be in the crowd, you may be in the mountains; it makes no difference, you are just the same watchfulness. In the crowd you watch the crowd; in the mountains you w

There is the third possibility, the possibility of the wise, who looks at life. Who has no theories to enforce on life, who just tries to understand. He comes to see that sex is the beginning but not the end. Sex is just an opportunity to grow beyond it—but one has to pass through it.

Man is not an entity, he is a bridge, a bridge between two eternities—the animal and the god, the unconscious and the conscious. Grow in consciousness, grow in freedom. Take each step out of your own choice. Create yourself and take the whole responsibility for it.