U.G. Krishnamurti Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

The body is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. There is no death for the body, only an exchange of atoms. Their changing places and taking different forms is what we call 'death.' It's a process which restores the energy level in nature that has gone down. In reality, nothing is born and nothing is dead.

There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.

Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.

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

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.

This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me: 'There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?' You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.

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!

Man is just a memory. You understand things around you by the help of the knowledge that was put in you. You perhaps need the artist to explain his modern art, but you don't need anybody's help to understand a flower. You can deal with anything, you can do anything if you do not waste your energy trying to achieve imaginary goals.

My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall....’ - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.

All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity.

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.

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.

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.

We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.

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".

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.

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.

We are using the neurons, our identity, to constantly maintain our identity. Whether you are awake, asleep, or dreaming, this process is carried on. But, it is wearing you out.That is why I say the tragedy that is facing mankind is not AIDS or cancer, but Alzthiemer's disease.

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

You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.

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

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.

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.

Don't follow me, I'm lost.

There is no such thing as experience here. You seem to know, you imagine. Imagination must come to an end...I don't know how to put it. The absence of imagination, the absence of will, the absence of effort, the absence of all movement in any direction, on any level, in any dimension - THAT is the thing. That is a thing that cannot be experienced at all. It is not an experience.

You know, this dialogue is only helpful when we come, both of us, to a point where we realize that no dialogue is possible, that no dialogue is necessary. When I say understanding or 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?"

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

Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. Knock off that hope and the crippling feelings of helplessness go with it.

I am simply pointing out that at the rate at which we are going the whole genetic engineering technology will end up in the hands of the political system to be used for the complete control and subjugation of man.

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.

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.

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

A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. He would ask you to walk, and he would say that if you fall, you will arise and walk.

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.

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events.

The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know.

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.

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.