Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was an Indian spiritual leader. His philosophy was based on a denunciation of organized religion and religious gurus, and the attainment of self-realization through introspection and self-knowledge.
Krishnamurti was born in Madanapalle in South India. While an adolescent, Annie Besant’s Theosophical Society took him under its wing and prepared him to become a savior figure. However, in 1929, Krishnamurti disengaged himself from the Theosophical Society and spent the rest of his life traveling and teaching independently.
Krishnamurti published his dialogues on a wide variety of spiritual and global issues. Drawing from several Hindu and Buddhist traditions, his teachings encouraged individuals to cultivate self-knowledge, and, through re-conditioning or de-conditioning their mental processes, to create a pure, undifferentiated awareness. His work is now spread through numerous Krishnamurti Foundation schools that he established worldwide.
Krishnamurti’s notable works include Freedom from the Known (1969,) and the compilations of his teachings in The Awakening of Intelligence (1987,) Think on These Things (1989,) and On Fear (1994.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jiddu Krishnamurti
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Thinking
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Life and Living
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
The flowering of love is meditation.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Meditation
The fact is that truth is life and life has no permanency. Life has to be discovered from moment to moment, from day to day. It has to be discovered. It cannot be taken for granted. If you take it for granted that you know life, than you are not living. Three meals a day, clothing, shelter, sex, your job, your amusement, and your thinking process—that dull, repetitive process is not life.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Few can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Problems, Identifying Problems, Problem-solving
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Tradition
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Acceptance
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Violence
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely, the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears, when you give your whole attention to it.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Trust
All tradition is merely the past.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Tradition
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Belief
To find out what you love to do demands a great deal of intelligence; because, if you are afraid of not being able to earn a livelihood, or of not fitting into this rotten society, then you will never find out. But, if you are not frightened, if you refuse to be pushed into the groove of tradition by your parents, by your teachers, by the superficial demands of society, then there is a possibility of discovering what it is you really love to do. So, to discover, there must be no fear of not surviving.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Do not think about yourself,
but be aware of the thought, emotion,
or action that makes you think of yourself.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Sorrow is not in death but in loneliness,
and conflict comes when you seek consolation,
forgetfullness, explanations, and illusions.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Worry
There is no need to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Learning
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Self-improvement, Progress
Learning is the very essence of humility, the learning from everything and from everybody. There is no hierarchy in learning.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Ideas have become far more important to us than action – ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present – that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Ideas
When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Listening, Feelings
To seek fulfillment is to invite frustration.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Topics: Realistic Expectations
Fear is the process of the mind in the struggle of becoming. In becoming good there is the fear of evil; in becoming complete, there is the fear of loneliness.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
The mind has to be empty to see clearly.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
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