This is a curated selection of Jiddu Krishnamurti quotes on free will (personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Jiddu Krishnamurti’s books (Amazon).
15 Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Free Will
“You do not choose, you do not decide when you see things very clearly; then you act (in a way which) which is not the action of will.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Choice implies duality. Choice implies effort … Choice is a process of the intellect.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Choice must exist only when the mind is confused. When it is clear, there is no choice.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Watchfulness, without any choice—just watch. Know myself—knowing myself all the time.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Be choicelessly aware—to choose, as we do, is one of our great conflicts.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Where there is love then do what you will, it will be right action.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“We discover the unity as a living thing—not a conceptual thing—when there is this sense of choiceless attention.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“(To be free is) to be aware of our conditioning … If one sees the consequences of all the conditioning, naturally it stops. There is no entity which says, ‘I must stop it’ … Only the free mind can see the whole … You are seeing things as they are, actually what is taking place.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“When he realises that the observer is the observed, all action ceases on his part, and therefore all effort. There is no fear at all. This requires a great deal of inward inquiry, inward observation, step by step, without coming to any conclusion.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“For most of us, we demand freedom politically, or religiously, or to think what we like—and there is the freedom of choice. Political freedom is all right, and one must have it, but for most of us we never demand and find out whether it is at all possible to be free inwardly. Our mind is a slave to its own projections, to its own demands, to its own desires and fulfillments; the mind is a slave to its cravings, to its appetites. And apparently we never ask whether it is at all possible to be free inwardly, but we are always wanting freedom outwardly—to go against the society, against a particular structure of society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“We are not individuals. We are the result of millions of years of collective experiences, memories, and all that. We think we are individuals. We think we are free. We are not. To us, freedom means choice. Choice means confusion. You don’t choose if you are clear.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If you see something very clearly—when the mind is only free that it can see the total—there is no choice. It’s only the confused mind that chooses. Awareness takes place only when there is no choice, or when you are aware of all the conflicting choices, conflicting desires, the strains—just to observe all this movement of contradiction. And, knowing that the observer is the observed, and therefore in that process there is no choice at all, but only watching ‘what is.’” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“To observe without any choice is the beginning of self-knowing. And, without self-knowing, man is caught everlastingly in confusion and misery.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“When there is actual sensitive awareness of what one is without any distortion—awareness of it without any choice—out of that there’s the ending of this mess.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Only the unintelligent mind exercises choice in life. When I talk of intelligence I mean it in its widest sense, I mean that deep inner intelligence of mind, emotion and will. A truly intelligent man can have no choice, because his mind can only be aware of what is true and can thus only choose the path of truth. An intelligent mind acts and reacts naturally and to its fullest capacity. It identifies itself spontaneously with the right thing. It simply cannot have any choice. Only the unintelligent mind has free will.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
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