Jiddu Krishnamurti
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Spiritual
True understanding is possible only when we are fully conscious of our thought, not as an operative observer on this thought, but completely and without the intervention of a choice.Collection: Spiritual
Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter.Collection: Spiritual
Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation.Collection: Spiritual
Is there a thinker apart from thought?Collection: Thinker
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.Collection: Love
Real freedom is not something to be acquired, it is the outcome of intelligence.Collection: Spiritual
All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.Collection: Atheist
To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.Collection: Life Is
It is necessary that one be a light to oneself in a world that is becoming utterly dark.Collection: Dark
Without love the acquisition of knowledge only increases confusion and leads to self-destruction.Collection: Knowledge
Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.Collection: Knowledge
You are this, which does not satisfy, so you want to be that. If there were an understanding of this, would that come into being? Because you do not understand this, you create that, hoping through that to understand or to escape from this.Collection: Understanding
I should say that all compromise is a "stepping down" of the Truth, is trying to reduce something which cannot be reduced, and that for anyone who has understood life these compromises are impossible.Collection: Trying
You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique.Collection: Color
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.Collection: Truth
You cannot explain to someone who comes with no idea of what you are talking about without being misunderstood.Collection: Talking
Can thought be silent?Collection: Silent
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?Collection: Memories
You may wish that some parts of (your face) were different, but the actual fact is shown in the mirror. Now, can you look at your conditioning in a similar way?Collection: Mirrors
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. .. 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.Collection: Pain
You have been overcome; and whether you are overcome by envy or by a so-called noble influence, you are still a slave, you are not free.Collection: Envy
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.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Body
When the mind sees itself in the mirror of relationship, from that perception there is self-knowledge.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Powerful
There you have the two extremes: the man that is concerned mainly with the hidden life, and the man who seriously concerns himself with the expression of that life. What I want to do is to bring about harmony between the two extremes, for therein lies the Truth. The harmony of life is the understanding of Truth.Collection: Lying
Truth is not a matter of argumentation and conviction; it is not the outcome of opinion.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Happiness
Seeing, observing, listening, these are the greatest actsCollection: Wise
Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.Collection: Perception Of Beauty
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.Collection: Love
Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter. That is all life is... Matter and energy are interrelated.Collection: Spiritual
Despair exists only when there is hope.Collection: Despair
If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.Collection: Spiritual
Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be.Collection: Spiritual
Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery.Collection: Spiritual
Belief conditions experience, and experience then strengthens belief.Collection: Belief
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.Collection: Time
Be a light unto oneselfCollection: Light
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. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Mean
Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom to all.Collection: Past
It is only in alert silence that truth can be.Collection: Silence
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Spiritual