J Krishnamurti Quotes

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

You can only be afraid of what you think you know.

Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.

Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.

do it or don't do it but get on with it...

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. ... The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.

When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.

[on the secret to a happy, content life] Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is always within the shadow of ignorance. Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is explosion of intelligence.

Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.

Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.

We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young -- not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age -- and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.

Find out for yourself what are the possesions and ideals that you do not desire. By knowing what you do not want, by elimination, you will unburden the mind, and only then will it understand the essential which is ever there.

A man who says, 'I want to change, tell me how to', seems very earnest, very serious, but he is not. He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring about order in himself. But can authority ever bring about inward order? Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.

To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves; and what is important in beginning with ourselves is the intention. The intention must be to understand ourselves and not to leave it to others to transform themselves or to bring about a modified change through revolution, either of the left or of the right. It is important to understand that this is our responsibility, yours and mine...

The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.

The very desire to be certain,to be secure,is the beginning of bondage.It's only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty,and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.

The word 'innocence' means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.

To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes. And for this, a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.

If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man either for gain, for "sport," for food, or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband.

Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.

You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is. I think that will be enough, won't it?

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.

The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.

People don’t realize, he said, how important it is to wake up every morning with a song in your heart.” J. Krishnamurti. “The song stands for a sense of joy in existence, a joy that is free of any good or bad choices.

The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world's problems.

All effort to bring order into disorder is disorder.

What has validity is your living, not what happens tomorrow.

We are the world. The world is you and me, the world is not separate from you and me. We have created this world - the world of violence, the world of wars, the world of religious divisions, sex, anxieties, the utter lack of communication with each other, with no sense of compassion, consideration for another. Wherever one goes in any country throughout the world, human beings, that is, you and another, suffer; we are anxious, we are uncertain, we don’t know what is going to happen. Everything has become uncertain. Right through the world as human beings we are in sorrow, fear, anxiety, violence, uncertain of everything, insecure. There is a common relationship between us all. We are the world essentially, basically, fundamentally. The world is you, and you are the world. Realizing that fundamentally, deeply, not romantically, not intellectually but actually, then we see that our problem is a global problem. It is not my problem or your particular problem, it is a human problem.

I hope that you will listen, but not with the memory of what you already know; and this is very difficult to do. You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding. Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all. You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding. If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds - in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense. When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain

Without inner revolution outer action is repetitive

The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty.

Peace is not something between two wars, or the peace of the politician. Peace is something entirely different.

Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, to think we are separate entities with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavor and struggle.

When the house is on fire, do you argue the color of the skin of the man who brings the water?

Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.

To be sensitively aware of thought, of feeling, of the world about you, of your office and of nature, is to explode from moment to moment in affection. Without affection, every action becomes burdensome and mechanical and leads to decay.

Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself. And, when one begins to understand oneself, not only the conscious but all the hidden parts of oneself as well, then there comes tranquility. Meditation demands constant watchfulness, constant awareness of every word, thought and feeling, which reveals the state of our own being, and as that is arduous, we escape into every kind of conformity, deceptive thing and call it meditation.

There can be freedom from fear only when there is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, which is the ending of fear.

There are those who don’t believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe at all in anything, though this doesn’t deny the extraordinary mystery of life. But belief is a word, a thought, and this is not the thing, anymore than your name is actually you. Through experience you hope to touch the truth of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions your experience. It isn’t that the experience comes to prove the belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else.

Thought is really the most mischievous thing in life, the greatest criminal.

each human being, each one of you, if I may point out, represents the whole of mankind.

He who has forgotten his childhood and lost sympathy with the children is not a man who can teach them or help them.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” —J. Krishnamurti

Deliberate attempt to meditate is not meditation. It must happen. […] Only be aware of what you are thinking and doing and nothing else.

We are asking if thought can be aware of itself. That is rather a complex question, and requires very careful observation. Thought has created wars through nationalism, through sectarian religions. Thought has created all this; God has not created the hierarchy of the church--the pope, all the robes, all the rituals, the swinging of the incense, the candles. All that paraphernalia that goes on in a cathedral or in a church is put together by thought, copied, some of it, from the ancient Egyptians, from the ancient Hindus, and Hebrews. It is all thought. So "God" is created by thought.

We often speak of something taxing a person's patience, but we really mean that it taxes a person's attention, for impatience is only the desire of the mind to attend to something more interesting than that which for the moment occupies it.

Why is there this everlasting craving to be loved? Listen carefully. You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring wether or not somebody loves you. As long as you demand to be loved, there is no love in you; and if you feel no love you are ugly, brutish, so why should you be loved?

The truth is a pathless land.

In any power-relationship, the ruled do want to change the situation to their advantage.

Observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence. (J. Krishnamurti)

He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways - there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie, but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner's course that has been misunderstood.

is reality, God, or whatever name you may give it, a fixed abode with a permanent address? “Of course not,” said the brother eagerly. Then how can there be a path to it? Surely, truth has no path.

When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end.

Because the brain functions perfectly only in order, not in disorder. It functions most efficiently when there is complete order, whether that order is neurotic or rational; because in neurosis, in imbalance, there is order, and the brain accepts that order.

So learning about pleasure, about fear, really frees you from the tortures of fear and the pursuit of pleasure. Then there is a sense of real enjoyment in life. Everything becomes a great joy. It isn’t just a monotonous routine, going to the office, sex, and money.

Andar sempre a procura de «experiências transcendentes», mais variadas e intensas, é uma forma de fugir da realidade presente, daquilo que é, ou seja, de nós mesmos, da nossa própria mente condicionada. Uma mente desperta, inteligente, livre, que necessidade tem dessas experiências? A luz é luz, não anda à procura de mais luz.

Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.

Those who reject both the goals and the means for the sake of their conscience, because they judge them to be of a wrong kind, are rebels. Their response is called rebellion.

As a poet said, “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.

A man may steal, murder to earn, to accumulate but in the end only to give—to his daughter, to his wife or to his lover.

Sir, love is not directed to something. The sunshine is not directed to you and me; it is there.

We should follow strict silence in a library. If we are not silent, it will disturb others, which will affect their learning. By not being silent, we become responsible for others’ ignorance.

Man hurts others—be it friends, neighbors, colleagues—fully knowing that hurt would be reciprocated. Men go to battles fully knowing the costs. Man seeks as much pain. He is nearly masochistic and suicidal.

The fact is that life is like the river: endlessly moving on, ever seeking, exploring, pushing, overflowing its banks, penetrating every crevice with its water. But you see, the mind won't allow that to happen to itself. The mind sees that it is dangerous, risky to live in a state of impermanency, insecurity, so it builds a wall around itself; the wall of tradition, of organized religion, of political and social theories. Family, name,property,the littel virtues that we have cultivated - these are all within the walls, away from life. Life is moving, impermanent, and it ceaselessly tries to penetrate, to break down these walls, behind which there is a confusion an misery. The gods within the walls are false gods, and their writings and philosophies have no meaning because life is beyond Think on these things chap. 17

Alienation from society bestows one with the advantage of maintaining a detached perspective upon the human race. Jidu Krishnamurti said, ‘The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

Men are not equal. The gifted should rule and the mediocre should follow; kindness or concern for others only pulls down the gifted from reaching their potential; when they don’t reach their potential growth, society loses.

And another question we are asking is: what is going to happen to humanity, to all of us, when the computer outthinks man in accuracy and rapidity—as the computer experts are saying it will? With the development of the robot, man will only have, perhaps, two hours of work a day. This may be going to happen within the foreseeable future. Then what will man do? Is he going to be absorbed in the field of entertainment? That is already taking place: sports are becoming more important; there is the watching of television; and there are the varieties of religious entertainment. Or is he going to turn inwardly, which is not an entertainment but something which demands great capacity of observation, examination and non-personal perception? These are the two possibilities. The basic content of our human consciousness is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear. Is humanity increasingly going to follow entertainment? 21st July, 1981

During a now famous lecture, the Eastern philosopher and spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti asked the audience “Do you want to know what my secret is?” According to several accounts of this story, in a soft voice, he said, “I don't mind what happens.

Yes, but we said delusion exists as long as there is desire and thought. That is simple. And desire and thought are part of the “I,” which is time. When desire and time are completely ended, then there is absolutely nothing, and therefore that is the universe, that emptiness which is full of energy

To know oneself is one of the most difficult things because in the observation of myself I come to a conclusion about what I am seeing; and the next observation is through that conclusion. Can one observe the actual anger without any conclusion, without saying right, wrong, good, bad? Can one observe holistically? Self-knowledge is not knowing oneself, but knowing every movement of thought. Because the self is the thought, the image, the image of K and the image of the `me.' So, watch every movement of thought, never letting one thought go without realizing what it is. Try it. Do it and you will see what takes place. This gives muscle to the brain. from: Exploration into Insight, Foreword

Wisdom is not in a book, it has no secret source. You will find the real very near; it is in yourself. But to discover it there must be the activity of constant alertness. When thought is passively aware, watching and following, then the map of self-knowledge unfolds itself. Self-knowledge is not by the study of the self in isolation, for there is no isolation. To live is to be related, and isolation is merely escape. If thought is alertly passive, watching its own movements and flutters, then when sleep comes the conscious mind is capable of receiving the hints and intimations of the hidden consciousness. He who desires to discover the real, the eternal, must put aside every book, every system, every guru, for that which is can be uncovered only through self-knowledge. From: Fifth Talk in Madras

To be aware is an extraordinary state of mind to be aware of your surroundings, of the trees, the bird that is singing, the sunset behind you. to be aware of the beauty of the land, the ripple of the water, - just to be aware, choiclessly. Please do this as you are going along. Listen to these birds; do not name, do not recognize the species, but just listen to the sound. Listen to the mouvement of your own thoughts; do not control them, do not shape them,do not say:" this is right, that is wrong" Just move with them. That is awareness in which there is no choice, no condemnation, no judgement, no comparison or interpretation, only mere observation. That makes your mind highly sensitive. The moment you go name, you have gone back, your mind becomes dull, because that is what you are used to. J. Krishnamurti

Do you know what it means to be discontented? It is very difficult to understand discontent, because most of us canalize discontent in a certain direction and thereby smother it. That is, our only concern is to establish ourselves in a secure position with well-established interests and prestige, so as not to be disturbed. It happens in homes and in schools too. The teachers don't want to be disturbed, and that is why they follow the old routine; because the moment one is really discontented and begins to inquire, to question, there is bound to be disturbance. But it is only through real discontent that one has initiative. Do you know what initiative is? You have initiative when you initiate or start something without being prompted. It need not be anything very great or extraordinary - that may come later; but there is the spark of initiative when you plant a tree on your own, when you are spontaneously kind, when you smile at a man who is carrying a heavy load, when you remove a stone from the path, or pat an animal along the way. That is a small beginning of the tremendous initiative you must have if you are to know this extraordinary thing called creativeness. Creativeness has its roots in the initiative which comes into being only when there is deep discontent.

We realize that life is ugly, painful, sorrowful; we want some kind of theory, some kind of speculation or satisfaction, some kind of doctrine, which will explain all this, and so we are caught in explanation, in words, in theories, and gradually beliefs become deeply rooted and unshakable because behind those beliefs, behind those dogmas, there is the constant fear of the unknown. But we never look at that fear; we turn away from it.

And man has sought immortality. A writer, if he is a good writer, seeks immortality through his books, through his words, through his thoughts. He is there, at least he is there, he thinks, permanently. There is nothing permanent. There is no permanency of you. Others seek immortality in history - the politicians, the kings. But you and I are not writers; we are not kings; we don't make history. We are ordinary people, living with trouble, pain, anxiety, not knowing, confused, with a little affection, we are the ordinary people. And also we want immortality. We have never asked what is immortality. That is, not mortality, immortality means no dying. And if one has gone into it very deeply, one sees there is nothing permanent, nothing, either on earth or in yourself. Which isn't a despair, which isn't something to be frightened of. And when you see there is nothing permanent, that very observation, that very perception is the highest form of intelligence. And intelligence, which is not personal, which is not yours, or mine, is the everlasting. And from there the mind becomes infinite, because it is no longer caught in attachment, it is no longer seeking anything, any experience. It is completely a light to itself and therefore eternal. from:J. Krishnamurti 3rd Public Talk Masonic Auditorium San Francisco 23rd March 1975

hair”.

However, we can learn to ignore them as soon as they appear in our minds by consciously avoiding in these cases to engage yourself in useless “inner chat” with the voice in your head - thus stopping the “birds of sorrow” from “building nests in your hair”.

Conflict is the essence of the self.

If there is no me, there is love.

It is our earth I don’t know if any of you have noticed, early in the morning, the sunlight on the waters. How extraordinarily soft is the light, and how the dark waters dance, with the morning stars over the trees, the only star in the sky. Do you ever notice any of that? Or are you so busy, so occupied with the daily routine, that you forget or have never known the rich beauty of this earth—this earth on which all of us have to live? Whether we call ourselves communists or capitalists, Hindus or Buddhists, Muslims or Christians, whether we are blind, lame, or well and happy, this earth is ours. It is our earth, not somebody else’s; it is not only the rich man’s earth, it does not belong exclusively to the powerful rulers, to the nobles of the land, but it is our earth, yours and mine. We are nobodies, yet we also live on this earth and we all have to live together. It is the world of the poor as well as of the rich, of the unlettered as well as of the learned; it is our world, and I think it is very important to feel this and to love the earth, not just occasionally on a peaceful morning, but all the time. This Matter of Culture, p 23

Triunfar significa conquistar el yo; significa aceptar los hechos y enfrentarnos a ellos; y donde haya malas hierbas arrancarlas. No importa cuán profundamente arraigadas estén, o cuanto sufrimiento se derive de esto. ¡Fuera con ellas! Duro trabajo, en verdad, pero los que ya han logrado entrar en alguno de los estados superiores nos dicen que bien merece la pena algún esfuerzo, grande o pequeño, de una vez por todas o muchas veces si es necesario.

thought is never new and therefore it can never answer any tremendous question. The old brain cannot solve the enormous problem of living. Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there.

But to be beyond violence I cannot suppress it, I cannot deny it, I cannot say, ‘Well, it is a part of me and that’s that’, or ‘I don’t want it’. I have to look at it, I have to study it, I must become very intimate with it and I cannot become intimate with it if I condemn it or justify it. We do condemn it, though; we do justify it. Therefore I am saying, stop for the time being condemning it or justifying it.