Top 681 Quotes & Sayings by Jiddu Krishnamurti - Page 7

Perception without the perceiver in meditation is to commune with the height and depth of the immense. This perception is entirely different from seeing an object without an observer, because in the perception of meditation there is no object and therefore no experience. can, however, take place when the eyes are open and one is surrounded by objects of every kind. But then these objects have no importance at all. One sees them but there is no process of recognition, which means there is no experiencing.

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.

Student: Sir, you said you must change the world. How can you change it, sir? Krishnamurti: What is the world? The world is where you live - your family, your friends, your neighbours. And your family, your friends, your neighbours can be extended and that is the world. Now, you are the centre of that world. That is the world you live in. Now how will you change the world? By changing yourself?

I admire and respect the tenacity, courage, and patience of the unenlightened in the face of so much overwhelming evidence

Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation.

Does a human being know the responsibility he has to himself and to all of mankind

Being discontented, we either seek a different job or merely succumb to environment...instead of causing us to question life, the whole process of existence.

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.

All tradition is merely the past.

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.

There are laws in some countries, I believe, which prohibit anyone from following you in the street, and if someone does, he can be arrested and put into prison. So, spiritually, I wish there were a police system which would put people into a spiritual prison for following others. In fact, it does happen automatically.

And the fear of not being is born in that space. But in meditation, when this is understood, the mind can enter into a dimension of space where action is inaction. We do not know what love is, for in the space made by thought around itself as the me, love is the conflict of the me and the not-me. This conflict, this torture, is not love. Thought is the very denial of love, and it cannot enter into that space where the me is not. In that space is the benediction which man seeks and cannot find. He seeks it within the frontiers of thought, and thought destroys the ecstasy of this benediction.

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.

Life is a joyous thing essentially, but when you bind life by all these rigid moralities and traditions, and dogmas and creeds, then there is misery.

Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect, and space is divided for him into dimensions; time, into past, present, and future.

To bring about a fundamental, radical revolution, we must begin with ourselves.

War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder.

You can look only when the mind is completely quiet.

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.

Freedom comes with self-knowledge, when the mind goes above and beyond the hindrances it has created for itself.

Do you decide to observe? Or do you merely observe?

Knowledge about yourself binds, weighs, ties you down; there is no freedom to move, and you act and move within the limits of thatknowledge. Learning about yourself is never the same as accumulating knowledge about yourself. Learning is active present and knowledge is the past; if you are learning to accumulate, it ceases to be learning; knowledge is static, more can be added to it or taken away from it, but learning is active, nothing can be added or taken away from it for there is no accumulation at any time.

Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars.

Analysis does not transform consciousness.

As long as the mind is seeking to fill itself, it will always be empty. When the mind is no longer concerned with filling its own emptiness, then only does that emptiness cease to be.

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

People must work things out for themselves. It is no good saying, "I have found a house which suits me and therefore everybody must adopt the same kind of house."

If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.

It is necessary for all of us to awaken in ourselves this spirit of cooperation, for then it will not be a mere plan or agreement which causes us to work together, but an extraordinary feeling of togetherness, the sense of joy in being and doing together without any thought of reward or punishment.

Wherever there is a suitable environment for the fulfilment of Life, it will fulfil itself.

As we are - the world is.

Education in the true sense is helping the individual to be mature and free, to flower greatly in love and goodness. That is what we should be interested in, and not in shaping the child according to some idealistic pattern.

But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.

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.

Real freedom is not something to be acquired, it is the outcome of intelligence.

In nothingness, there is everything, energy. The ending is a beginning.

Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imaginal bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion, attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day.

Introspection is self-improvement and therefore introspection is self-centeredness. Awareness is not self-improvement. On the contrary, it is the ending of the self, of the “I,” with all its peculiar idiosyncrasies, memories, demands, and pursuits. In introspection there is identification and condemnation. In awareness there is no condemnation or identification; therefore, there is no self-improvement. There is a vast difference between the two.

The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step, and the first step is the only step.

The observer is the observed.

Why haven't we, with all our cunning, experience, resolved this problem of fear completely? Isn't fear the cause of the 'me'?

The demand to be safe in a relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear.

You cannot prevent a man getting drunk if he wishes to do so, but when he becomes a nuisance, then you interfere.

Surely love has nothing to do with the mind, it is not the product of the mind; love is entirely independent of calculation, of thought.

Ugliness is a lack of harmony, assuredly. And evil is the same thing of course.

Intelligence comes into being when the mind, the heart and the body are really harmonious.

The word 'innocence' means 'incapable of being hurt'. To have a mind that is not capable of being hurt, does not mean that it has built up a lot of resistance - on the contrary, such a mind is dying to everything that it has known in which there has been conflict, pleasure and pain. Only then is the mind innocent; that means it can love. You cannot love with memory, love is not a matter of remembrance, of time.

The thought is not the thing.

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

We are empty shells if we do not possess, if we do not fill our life with furniture, with music, with knowledge, with this or that. And that shell makes a lot of noise, and that noise we call living, and with that we are satisfied.

Knowing the cause of something is not going to help you to be free of it.

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.

Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter. That is all life is... Matter and energy are interrelated.

If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly.

A man who is really earnest must begin with himself, he must be passively aware of all his thoughts, feelings and actions.

Are you trying to grasp the quality of intelligence, compassion, the immense sense of beauty, the perfume of love and that truth which has no path to it?

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

And it is impossible to treat human beings as human beings if you label them, if you term them, if you give them a name as Hindus, Russians, or what you will. It is so much easier to label people, for then you can pass by and kick them, drop a bomb on India or Japan.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.