194 quotes
We are a strange mixture of hate, fear and gentleness; we are both violence and peace.
Freedom from the Known (1969)
You must bear your karma cheerfully, whatever it may be, taking it as an honor that Suffering comes to you, because it shows that the Lords of Karma think you worth helping. However hard it is, be thankful that it is no worse.
At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Each one of us is the storehouse of all the past. The individual is the human who is all mankind.
Freedom from the Known (1969)
The human being is not a local entity. He is everywhere.
Freedom from the Known (1969)
Is there a thinker apart from thought?
When you think of God, your God is the projection of your own thought, the result of social influences. You can think only of the known; you cannot think of the unknown, you cannot concentrate on truth.
Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is "right" — empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is.
There are the states of inattention and of attention. When you are completely giving your mind, your heart, your nerves, everything you have, to attend, then the old habits, the mechanical responses, do not enter into it, thought does not come into it at all.
When the mind seeks truth, the truth it has read about in books, that "truth" is self-projected, for then the mind is merely in pursuit of the known, a more satisfactory known than the previous one. When the mind seeks truth, it is seeking its own self-projection, not truth.
For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints.
Freedom from the Known (1969)
Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.
Truth is a Pathless Land (1929)
The individual is the little conditioned, miserable, frustrated entity, satisfied with his little gods and his little traditions, whereas a human being is concerned with the total welfare, the total misery and total confusion of the world.
Freedom from the Known (1969)
The moment you know love, you have ceased to love. Love is beyond time; it has no beginning and no end, whereas knowledge has; and when you say, “I know what love is”, you don’t. You know only a sensation, a stimulus. You know the reaction to love, but that reaction is not love.
The world is me and I am the world.
Can't you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship? I love someone and she loves me and we get married — that is all perfectly straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all.
Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Bulletin 3 (1969)
The rich cannot come to the truth, neither the poor. Nor the people who have taken a vow of celibacy, of silence, of austerity. All that is determined by thought, put together sequentially by thought; it is all the cultivation of deliberate thought, of deliberate intent.
What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. When a brain that is trained to have problems, and to live with problems, solves one problem, in the very solution of that problem, it creates more problems.
That Benediction is Where You Are (1985)
And as we are — the world is. … If we would bring about a sane and happy society we must begin with ourselves and not with another, not outside of ourselves, but with ourselves.
You must give up all feeling of possession. Karma may take from you the things which you like best — even the people whom you love most. Even then you must be cheerful — ready to part with anything and everything.
At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation.
Krishnamurti's Notebook (1976)