Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

“Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new, and therefore it is its own eternity.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness: A Compelling Investigation of Intimate Relationships, Isolation, and Self-Knowledge

“Thought is the origin of fear.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Mais lire, jouer, rire, être cruel, être bon, contempler le fleuve, les nuages, tout cela fait partie de la vie, et si vous ne savez pas lire, si vous ne savez pas marcher, si vous êtes incapable d'apprécier la beauté d'une feuille, vous n'êtes pas vivant. Vous devez comprendre la globalité de la vie, pas simplement une parcelle. Voilà pourquoi vous devez lire, voilà pourquoi vous devez regarder le ciel, voilà pourquoi vous devez chanter, et danser, et écrire des poèmes, et souffrir, et comprendre : car c'est tout cela, la vie.”
― 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, Freedom from the Known

“What is personal death?

Asking this question and pausing to look inward - isn't personal death a concept? Isn't there a thought-and-picture series going on in the brain? These scenes of personal ending take place solely in the imagination, and yet they trigger great mental ad physical distress - thinking of one's cherished attachments an their sudden, irreversible termination.

Similarly, if there is 'pain when I let some of the beauty of life in' - isn't this pain the result of thinking, 'I won't be here any longer to enjoy this beauty?' Or, 'No one will be around and no beauty left to be enjoyed if there is total nuclear devastation.'

Apart from the horrendous tragedy of human warfare - why is there this fear of 'me' not continuing? Is it because I don't realize that all my fear and trembling is for an image? Because I really believe that this image is myself?

In the midst of this vast, unfathomable, ever-changing, dying, and renewing flow of life, the human brain is ceaselessly engaged in trying to fix for itself a state of permanency and certainty. Having the capacity to think and form pictures of ourselves, to remember them and become deeply attached to them, we take this world of pictures and ideas for real. We thoroughly believe in the reality of the picture story of our personal life. We are totally identified with it and want it to go on forever. The idea of "forever" is itself an invention of the human brain. Forever is a dream.

Questioning beyond all thoughts, images, memories, and beliefs, questioning profoundly into the utter darkness of not-knowing, the realization may suddenly dawn that one is nothing at all - nothing - that all one has been holding on to are pictures and dreams. Being nothing is being everything. It is wholeness. Compassion. It is the ending of separation, fear, and sorrow.

Is there pain when no one is there to hold on?

There is beauty where there is no "me".”
― Toni Packer, The Work of This Moment

“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, Freedom from the Known

“virtue can flower only when there is freedom.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

“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, Freedom from the Known

“July 1st
It’s as though everything stood still. There is no movement, no stirring, complete emptiness of all thought, of all seeing. There is no interpreter to translate, to observe, to censor. An immeasurable vastness that is utterly still and silent. There is no space, nor time to cover that space. The beginning and the ending are here, of all things. There is really nothing that can be said about it.
The pressure and the strain have been going on quietly all day; only now they have increased.

2nd
The thing which happened yesterday, that immeasurable still vastness, went on all the evening, even though there were people and general talk. It went on all night; it was there in the morning. Though there was rather exaggerated, emotionally agitated talk, suddenly in the middle of it, it was there. And it is here, there’s a beauty and a glory and there’s a sense of wordless ecstasy.
The pressure and the strain began rather early.

3rd
Been out all day. All the same, in a crowded town in the afternoon, for two or three hours the pressure and the strain of it was on.

4th
Been busy, but in spite of it, the pressure and the strain of it was there in the afternoon.
Whatever actions one has to do in daily life, the shocks and the various incidents should not leave their scars. These scars become the ego, the self, and as one lives, it becomes strong and its walls almost become impenetrable.

5th
Been too busy but whenever there is some quiet, the pressure and the strain was on.

6th
Last night woke up with that sense of complete stillness and silence; the brain was fully alert and intensely alive; the body was very quiet. This state lasted for about half an hour. This in spite of an exhausting day.
The height of intensity and sensitivity is the experiencing of essence. It’s this that is beauty beyond word and feeling. Proportion and depth, light and shade are limited to time-space, caught in beauty-ugliness. But that which is beyond line and shape, beyond learning and knowledge, is the beauty of essence.

7th
Woke up several times shouting. Again there was that intense stillness of the brain and a feeling of vastness. There has been pressure and strain.
Success is brutality. Success in every form, political and religious, art and business. To be successful implies ruthlessness.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti's Notebook

“A man who knows what it is to have humility is a vain man.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

“Fear is the movement of time”
― 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, Freedom from the Known

“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, Freedom from the Known

“we do not ask. We want to be told. One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

“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, Freedom from the Known

“A man who knows that he is silent, who knows that he loves, does not know what love is or what silence is.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

“The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“You discover yourself not in isolation, but in relationship. To discover how you react, what your responses are”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti