You cannot love for twenty-four hours a day. Loving for twenty-four hours a day is like a man eating for twenty-four hours a day. Love is food. You should not move to the extreme, otherwise food can become poison. That is how things turn to their opposite. Food nourishes, but eat too much and food becomes poison, it kills. That which was a nourishment becomes a poison and a killer. Love is a nourishment; do it too much, overdo it, and it kills. And only hatred is left. Do anything too much and you will find the opposite of it has happened.

Be after money too much and in the end you will find you are a beggar, empty. You have missed a whole life and the very point of it. You missed all the enrichments that life could have given to you because you were too much after riches. Be after happiness and move to the extreme and you will be the most unhappy man in the world. To be happy one need not go after happiness too much. Sometimes one has to forget about it; sometimes one has even to enjoy unhappiness. To be happy, I am saying sometimes one has to enjoy unhappiness also. That too is part of life – and beautiful. This is how the balance is maintained. If you are laughing twenty-four hours a day, your laughter will become neurotic. It will no more be a laughter – you will go mad. To keep laughter alive and sane, tears are also needed. You cannot laugh twenty-four hours a day.

Watch children, because they are pure beings and they reflect things absolutely clearly; they are mirrorlike. In the villages, if a child laughs too much mothers say, “Don’t laugh too much, otherwise you will weep.” There is some wisdom in it. If a child laughs too much he is bound to weep. You can see – he is laughing, he is laughing, he is laughing…and suddenly he has started crying. The laughter came to the extreme and became crying.

You cannot be happy twenty-four hours a day; unhappiness is a relaxation. You cannot be unhappy for twenty-four hours; happiness is a relaxation. It is tightrope walking. And man is foolish because man is too logical.

You live in the world as a grihastha, as a householder. Then for twenty-four hours a day you live in the world; not for even one hour in twenty-four are you out of it – in meditation, in prayer, in isolation, alone, enjoying just yourself, not bothering about the world and worldly things – no. Then one day you get fed up with it. It is bound to be so, it is going to happen: if you remain a householder twenty-four hours a day, one day you will get fed up, to the extreme you have come. Then you renounce and run away to the Himalayas.