U.G. Krishnamurti Quotes

If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.

The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all.

Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.

You know, this dialogue is only helpful when we come, both of us, to a point and realize that no dialogue is possible, that no dialogue is necessary. When I say 'understanding', 'seeing', they mean something different to me. Understanding is a state of being where the question isn't there any more; there is nothing there that says "now I understand!" - that's the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere.

Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declarations of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes, it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood, love and that kind of thing, but out of the urgent drive to survive. It is the same with us, but only in a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing: if I try to destroy you, I will also be destroyed.

Charity is the filthiest invention of the human mind: first you steal what belongs to everyone; then you use the law and various other means to protect it.

You give charity to prevent the have-nots from rebelling against you. It also makes you feel less guilty. All do-gooders feel 'high' when they do good.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man".

Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is you. There is nothing there inside you other than that.

There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.

The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call "yourself" is fear. The "you" is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.

Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised

I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.

Yes! is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.

Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow." Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. Thinking does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.

You love fear. The ending of fear is death, and you don't want that to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence.
Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

Food, clothing and shelter - these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.

It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.

freedom exists not in finding answers, but in the dissolution of all questions.

There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your 'logically' ascertained premise, which you call truth.

My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.

Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

The body is not interested in anything you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time.

Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs.

A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.

There is no need to change this world at all; and there is no need to change yourself either.

When you'r no longer identified with roles and labels and conventional definition of person

Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.

You think when you don't want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don't think!

We don't want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear.

Don't follow me, I'm lost.

What is there to understand? The significance of life? How long will it take to understand the significance and the meaning of life? 20 years? 30 years? And the same question will be here in another 20 years, I guarantee you. Until you stop asking that question. When that question is not there, you are there. So that's the reason why you keep asking the question: you do not want the question to come to an end. When that comes to an end, there will not be anybody, left there, to find out the meaning, the purpose and the significance of life.

You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that

I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine.

Society or culture or whatever you might want to call it, has created us all solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its continuity and status quo.

The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?

The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.

All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.

The questioner has to come to an end. It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner.

It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.

There is nothing there - no soul - there is only this question about after death. The question has to die now to find the answer - your answer; not my answer - because the question is born out of the assumption, the belief, that there is something to continue after death.

You are not ready to accept the fact that you have to give up. A complete and total 'surrender'.

It is a state of hopelessness which says that there is no way out. Any movement in any direction, on any dimension, at any level, is taking you away from yourself.

If anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phony he is; the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.

*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.

The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no 'how'. If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that (search), strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions: "How, how, how?"

I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, 'Is there enlightenment?' but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal of enlightenment exists, I have had to search. It is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.

I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize
that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in
the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize
and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you.

You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur.

I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.

Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement.

Nature is interested in only two things
to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man.