Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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. Is this not what is actually taking place all over the world? Our present education is geared to industrialization and war, its principal aim being to develop efficiency; and we are caught in this machine of ruthless competition and mutual destruction. If education leads to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, has it not utterly failed?

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sirs, if you are listening and are not acting, it is like a man who is always tilling but never sowing. It is better not to listen to a truth than to listen without acting, for then it becomes a poison.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand - a very difficult thing to do because most of us don't know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight - if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same, as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

So if you understand that where there is a search for pleasure there must be pain, live that way if you want to, but don't just slip into it. If you want to end pleasure, though, which is to end pain, you must be totally attentive to the whole structure of pleasure - not cut it out as monks and sannyasis do, never looking at a woman because they think it is a sin and thereby destroying the vitality of their understanding - but seeing the whole meaning and significance of pleasure. Then you will have tremendous joy in life. You cannot think about joy. Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

We need a tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear but when there is this energy which comes from throwing off every form of fear, that energy itself produces the radical inward revolution.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear...It is not discipline first and then freedom; freedom is at the very beginning, not at the end.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Seeing everything that goes on in your daily life, your daily activities - when you pick up a pen, when you talk, when you go out for a drive or when you are walking alone in the woods - can you with one breath, with one look, know yourself very simply as you are? When you know yourself as you are, then you understand the whole structure of man's endeavour, his deceptions, his hypocrisies, his search. To do this you must be tremendously honest with yourself throughout your being.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

virtue can flower only when there is freedom.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

any movement which is worth while, any action which has any deep significance, must begin with each one of us. I must change first; I must see what is the nature and structure of my relationship with the world - and in the very seeing is the doing; therefore I, as a human being living in the world, bring about a different quality, and that quality, it seems to me, is the quality of the religious mind.The religious mind is something entirely different from the mind that believes in religion...A religious mind does not seek at all, it cannot experiment with truth. Truth is not something dictated by your pleasure or pain, or by your conditioning as a Hindu or whatever religion you belong to. The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is - what actually is.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

You have to be a light to yourself in a world that is utterly becoming dark.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

To put it differently, as long as mind and heart are caught up in want, in desire, there must be emptiness.You want things, ideas, persons, only when you are conscious of your own emptiness, and that wanting creates a choice.When there is craving there must be choice, and choice precipitates you into the conflict of experiences.You have the capacity to choose, and thereby you limit yourself by your choice. Only when mind is free from choice is there liberation.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti