Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

You only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics,you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention.

The guru cannot awaken you; all that he can do is to point out what is.

Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action.

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.

The individual problem is the world problem. Therefore let us return to the problem of individual perfection and the establishing of peace in the heart and in the mind of the individual.

Discipline is necessary to curb the mind, otherwise there is no peace.

To me, then, true criticism consists in trying to find out the intrinsic worth of the thing itself, and not in attributing a quality to that thing. You attribute a quality to an environment, to an experience, only when you want to derive something from it, when you want to gain or to have power or happiness. Now this destroys true criticism. Your desire is perverted through attributing values, and therefore you cannot see clearly. Instead of trying to see the flower in its original and entire beauty, you look at it through coloured glasses, and therefore you can never see it as it is.

The craving to become causes fears; to be, to achieve, and so to depend engenders fear.

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

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

Through self-knowledge you begin to find out what is God, what is truth, what is that state which is timeless. In self-knowledge is the whole universe; it embraces all the struggles of humanity.

Our conflict is in relationship, at all levels of our existence; and the understanding of this relationship, completely and extensively, is the only real problem that each one has.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

You must know for yourself, directly, the truth of yourself and you cannot realize it through another, however great. There is no authority that can reveal it.

It is only in alert silence that truth can be.

If you wish to produce a perfect rose, you must cut off the other buds which are spoiling the growth of the perfect flower.

Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure.

Meditation is the movement of love. It isn't the love of the one or of the many. It is like water that anyone can drink out of any jar.

It is man's pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.

True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being-free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies-and therefore you can find out what religion is.

It is raining and you can hear the pattern of the drops. You can hear it with your ears, or you can hear it out of that deep silence. If you hear it with complete silence of the mind, then the beauty of it is such that cannot be put into words or onto canvas, because that beauty is something beyond self-expression .

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

In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love.

If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.

But inwardly we are as corrupt as the person who sits in an office and plans war-because, we want to be somebody in the family, in a group, in society, in the nation.

Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.

Truth is more in the process than in the result.

To be free comes not from changing or fixing this world, but from seeing this world as it is and opening the heart in the midst of it.

Doesn't becoming imply time?

If people who say they love their children meant it, would there be war? And would there be division of nationalities - would there be these separations?

Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.

Why is one a slave to thought ? Why has thought become so important in all our lives -thought being ideas, being the response to the accumulated memories in the brain cells? Perhaps many of you have not even asked such a question before, or if you have you may have said, "it's of very little importance- what is important is emotion." But I don't see how you can separate the two. If thought does not give continuity to feeling, feeling dies very quickly. So why in our daily lives, in our grinding, boring, frightened lives, has thought taken on such inordinate importance?

The Creative knows the great beginnings. The Receptive completes the finished things. The Creative is decided and therefore shows to men the easy. The Receptive is yielding and therefore shows to men the simple. Learning is movement from moment to moment.

Be a light unto oneself

If you are lucky and work very hard, you may someday get to experience freedom from the known.

I would teach my child to respect what is right - the word right is a difficult word to use - I would teach him to respect the intrinsic value of things. Do you see what I mean? The true proportion of things.

I think one has to understand, not as a theory, not as a speculative, entertaining concept, but rather as an actual fact - that we are the world and the world is us. The world is each one of us; to feel that, to be really committed to it and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary, but whole.

Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free. But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief; because your belief projects what you think God ought to be, what you think ought to be true. If you believe God is love, God is good, God is this or that, your very belief prevents you from understanding what is God, what is true.

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.

If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.

Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.

Yoga exercises are excellent; the speaker does them every day, for an hour or more; but that is merely physical exercise, to keep the body healthy, and so on.

The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it is not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that is the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically, Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you cannot enter into this world, into the world of creation.

Ugliness and evil are necessary for growth but they may be experienced vicariously.

The becoming still can never be the being still; only with the death of becoming is there being.

The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.