104 Quotes by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti, an influential philosopher and spiritual teacher, advocated for a profound shift in human consciousness through self-awareness and the abandonment of dogma. Rejecting the notion of gurus and organized religious structures, Krishnamurti emphasized the importance of direct personal experience and independent thinking. His teachings centered on the exploration of the mind and the nature of thought, urging individuals to transcend conditioning and truly understand the mechanics of their own thinking. He believed that true freedom and transformation could only arise through the dissolution of mental patterns and the pursuit of inner clarity. Krishnamurti's philosophy challenges us to question our beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions, encouraging a deeper engagement with the complexities of existence and the pursuit of a more authentic and liberated way of living.
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay. (Meaning)
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased. (Meaning)
It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free. (Meaning)
Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind. (Meaning)
Its beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. it means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. (Meaning)
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.
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.
"I don't mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom.
It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes,
deep inside yourself, you'll feel good no matter what."
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
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.
Throughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself.
A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is. (Meaning)
Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture we live in, and that culture is the product of man. There is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture.
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.
Here is my secret: I don't mind what happens. (Meaning)
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.
Find out what it means to die - not physically, that's inevitable - but to die to everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachments, to all the things that you have accumulated, the known, the known pleasures, the known fears. Die to that every minute and you will see what it means to die so that the mind is made fresh, young, and therefore innocent, so that there is incarnation not in a next life, but the next day.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.
There is hope in people, not in society, not in systems, but in you and me.
How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desire, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice.
Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being bring about the change in yourself.
Intuition is the whisper of the soul. (Meaning)
When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.
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 moment I am aware that I am aware, I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not.
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.
It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living. To live is to find out for yourself what is true.
As long as you ask questions you are breaking through, but the moment you begin to accept, you are psychologically dead. So right through life don't accept a thing, but inquire, investigate. Then you will find that your mind is something really extraordinary, it has no end, and to such a mind there is no death.
Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure and the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes unsought and uninvited. Once it is there, though you may live in the world with all its noise, pleasure and brutality, they will not touch that mind.
When we stop fighting with ourselves, we aren't creating anymore conflict in our mind. Then our mind can for the first time relax and be still.
We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not.
If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.
If we want to change existing conditions, we must first transform ourselves, which means that we must become aware of our own actions, thoughts and feelings in everyday life.
So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love.
There can only be a relationship between human beings when we accept what is, not what should be.
The mind has to be empty to see clearly.
I do not know if you have ever noticed that the more you struggle to understand, the less you understand any problem. But, the moment you cease to struggle and let the problem tell you the whole story, give all its significance - then there is understanding, which means, obviously, that to understand, the mind must be quiet.
There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.
If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself.
You can only be afraid of what you think you know. (Meaning)
Have you ever sat very quietly with closed eyes and watched the movement of your own thinking? Have you watched your mind working ?or rather, has your mind watched itself in operation, just to see what your thoughts are, what your feelings are, how you look at the trees, at the flowers, at the birds, at people, how you respond to a suggestion or react to a new idea? Have you ever done this?
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. (Meaning)
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is.
A mind that is always comparing, always measuring, will always engender illusion. If I am measuring myself against you, who are clever, more intelligent, I am struggling to be like you and I am denying myself as I am. I am creating an illusion.
Knowledge is an addiction, as drink; knowledge does not bring understanding. Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom; there must be freedom from knowledge for the coming of wisdom.
What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.
Most people are unhappy; and they are unhappy because there is no love in their hearts.
The fundamental factor of self-deception is this constant desire to be something in this world and in the world hereafter.
Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, How beautiful it is? All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness There is a poem, there is a song. Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with The music of many leaves, Which in due season fall and are blown away. And this is the way of life.
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 - aware of your speech, 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.
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.
Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation.
Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.
When the mind is relaxed, no longer making an effort, when it is quiet for just a few seconds, then the problem reveals itself and it is solved. That happens when the mind is still, in the interval between two thoughts, between two responses. In that state of mind, understanding comes.
It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child.
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.
Meditation is the most extraordinary thing if you know how to do it, and you cannot possibly learn from anybody; and that's the beauty of it. It isn't something you learn, a technique, and therefore there is no authority. Therefore if you will learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, the way you talk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy. If you are aware of it without any choice, all that is part of meditation, and as you go, as you journey, as that movement goes, all that movement is meditation. Then that movement is endless, timeless.
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
Be a light unto oneself.
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.
Truth is more in the process than in the result. (Meaning)
So you have to be your own teacher and your own disciple, and there is no teacher outside, no saviour, no master; you yourself have to change, and therefore you have to learn to observe, to know yourself. This learning about yourself is a fascinating and joyous business.
Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy.
Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.
It is a great art to have an abundance of knowledge and experience - to know the richness of life, the beauty of existence, the struggles, the miseries, the laughter, the tears - and yet keep your mind very simple; and you can have a simple mind only when you know how to love.
If you seem something that is true and do not act then you are wasting your life. And life is too precious. It is all that we have.
Only when the mind is still, tranquil, not expecting or grasping or resisting a single thing, is it possible to see what is true. It is the truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.
One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
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.
Most people like to live in illusions.
What you believe you experience.
And as we are - the world is. That is, if we are greedy, envious, competitive, our society will be competitive, envious, greedy, which brings misery and war. The State is what we are.
Ugliness and evil are necessary for growth but they may be experienced vicariously.
The real is near, you do not have to seek it; and a man who seeks truth will never find it. Truth is in what is - and that is the beauty of it. But the moment you conceive it, the moment you seek it, you begin to struggle; and a man who struggles cannot understand. That is why we have to be still, observant, passively aware.
To be absolutely nothing is to be beyond measure.
No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be.
If you come across fear, stare it in its eyes. Face it and you will notice that fear fades away.
Discipline does not mean suppression and control, nor is it adjustment to a pattern or ideology. It means a mind that sees 'what is' and learns from 'what was'.
Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness.
As we are concerned with what others think of us, so we are anxious to know all about them; and from this arise the crude and subtle forms of snobbishness and the worship of authority. Thus we become more and more externalized and inwardly empty. The more externalized we are, the more sensations and distractions there must be, and this gives rise to a mind that is never quiet, that is not capable of deep search and discovery.
Pain itself destroys pain. Suffering itself frees man from suffering.
To keep always in the same place means to stagnate.
Sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. We have lost it, or we have never had it; and, because we do not know how to judge anything, we have been led here and pushed there, beaten up, driven, politically, religiously and socially. We don't know, but it is difficult to say we don't know.
In awareness there is no becoming, there is no end to be gained. There is silent observation without choice and condemnation, from which there comes understanding.
Transformation can only take place immediately; the revolution is now, not tomorrow.
Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.
Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. . Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.
Only the free mind knows what Love is.
The crisis is not out there in the world, it is within our own consciousness.
In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind.
To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution.
Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery.
Despair exists only when there is hope.
Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself, not as you would wish to be, but as you are.
Are you aware of the significance of every thought, of every reaction that you happen to have?
Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
Without knowing yourself, there is no peace.
All paths do not lead to truth. There is no path to truth, it must come to you.
Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.
A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.
Happy is the man who is nothing.
The enemy is not the other, the enemy is you
From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.
Aloneness is obviously not isolation, and it is not uniqueness. To be unique is merely to be exceptional in some way, whereas to be completely alone demands extraordinary sensitivity, intelligence, understanding.
Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter. That is all life is. Matter and energy are interrelated.
The guru cannot awaken you; all that he can do is to point out what is.
The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.
The unknown is not measurable by the known. Time cannot measure the timeless, the eternal, that immensity which has no beginning and no end... when we try to measure something which is not measurable, we only get caught in words.
Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both.
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is.
It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. Thought cannot have an insight.
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
Discipline is necessary to curb the mind, otherwise there is no peace.
Can another help bring about a transformation in you? If he can, you are not transformed; you are merely dominated, influenced.
To seek fulfillment is to invite frustration.
Seeing, observing, listening, these are the greatest acts
Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality.
To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
Till the false is seen as the false, truth is not.
All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other.
One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.
Love is the most practical thing in the world. To love, to be kind, not to be greedy, not to be ambitious, not to be influenced by people but to think for yourself-these are all very practical things, and they will bring about a practical, happy society.
The man who is seeking truth is free of all societies and cultures.
That is the first thing to learn - not to seek. When you seek you are really only window-shopping. The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself. Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it meant to live.We don't know how to live,therefore we don't know how to die
Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be.
Truth is something which you must see immediately — and to see something clearly you must give your heart and your mind and your whole being to it immediately.
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.
Without total freedom, every perception, every objective regard, is twisted. It is only the man who is totally free that can look and understand immediately. Freedom implies really, doesn't it, the total emptying of the mind. To completely empty the whole content of the mind — that is real freedom.
As long as the mind clings to belief, it is held in a prison.
The observer is the observed.
National discord is, like religion, a standardized form of revolt; and the moment a revolt is standardized, it is no longer a revolt.
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.
Learning is not the accumulation of knowledge. Learning is movement from moment to moment.
To die every day to every problem, every pleasure, and not carry over any problem at all; so the mind remains tremendously attentive, active, clear.
Adhere to the Truth rather than to the personality, and take to heart the Truth rather than the authority of another.
What meaning has such meditation? There is no meaning; there is no utility. But in that meditation there is a movement of great ecstasy which is not to be confounded with pleasure. It is this ecstasy which gives to the eye, to the brain and to the heart, the quality of innocency. Without seeing life as something totally new, it is a routine, a boredom, a meaningless affair. So meditation is of the greatest importance. It opens the door to the incalculable, to the measureless.
War is a stage brought about by the standardizing of thought, revolt, and life - not by the freedom of life, not by the revolt of life.
Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.
As long as the mind is in conflict-blaming, resisting, condemning-there can be no understanding. If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you, obviously.
― Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
