Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes and Sayings

• One cannot understand anything intellectually - you may hear words, give explanations, find out the cause, but that is not understanding. Understanding - as one observes oneself - takes place only when the mind, including the brain, is totally attentive. And one is not attentive when one is interpreting and translating what one sees according to one's background.
   
• Most of us thrive on self-pity, blaming others, and this occupation doesn't bring clarity.
   
• One of our greatest problems is sorrow. We have accepted sorrow as a way of life, just as we have accepted war as a way of life war not only on the battlefield but war within ourselves the everlasting struggle, both inwardly and outwardly. We have accepted sorrow as a way of life, yet we have never asked if it is at all possible to end sorrow, completely.
   
• Without understanding beauty and love and meditation - the real thing I mean - then life as it is, lived as it is, with its sorrow, pain, conflict, has very little meaning. You may take drugs to give it meaning, you may cling to your sexual appetites to give life a meaning, but dependence on any drug on any thought, or any demand of pleasure, only brings about more conflict, more misery, more confusion.
   
• I feel very strongly that each one of us, being responsible for the chaos, misery and sorrow in the world, that each one of us as a human being must bring about a radical revolution in himself. Because each in himself is both the society and the individual, he is both violence and peace, he is this strange mixture of pleasure and hate and fear, aggressiveness, domination and gentleness; sometimes one predominates over the other and there is a great deal of unbalance in all of us.
   
• We are responsible not only to the world but also responsible for ourselves, in what we do, what we think, how we act, how we feel.
   
• To find out the purpose of life, the mind must be free of measurement; then only can it find out - otherwise, you are merely projecting your own want. This is not mere intellection, and if you go into it deeply, you will see its significance. After all, it is according to my prejudice, to my want, to my desire, to my predilection, that I decide what the purpose of life is to be. So, my desire creates the purpose. Surely, that is not the purpose of life.
   
• To avoid suffering we cultivate detachment. Being forewarned that attachment sooner or later entails sorrow, we want to become detached. Attachment is gratifying, but perceiving the pain in it, we want to be gratified in another manner, through detachment. Detachment is the same as attachment as long as it yields gratification. So what we are really seeking is gratification, we crave to be satisfied by whatever means.
   
• What matters is to be totally conscious of habit; for then, as you will see for yourself there is no longer the formation of habit. To resist habit, to fight it, to deny it, only gives continuity to habit. When you fight a particular habit you give life to that habit, and then the very fighting of it becomes a further habit. But if you are simply aware of the whole structure of habit without resistance, then you will find there is freedom from habit, and in that freedom a new thing takes place.
   
• It is only the dull, sleepy mind that creates and clings to habit. A mind that is attentive from moment to moment—attentive to what it is saying, attentive to the movement of its hands, of its thoughts, of its feelings—will discover that the formation of further habits has come to an end. This is very important to understand, because as long as the mind is breaking down one habit, and in that very process creating another, it can obviously never be free; and it is only the free mind that can perceive something beyond itself.