This page lists some of the all-time best Jiddu Krishnamurti quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Mind & Thought Quotes
- Separation & Conflict Quotes
- Self-Inquiry Quotes
- Will & Choice Quotes
- Observer & Observed Quotes
50+ Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Thought, Self-Inquiry, Observer is Observed, & More
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Mind & Thought
“Time and thought are the root of fear. There is no division between thought and time. Thought is time … Either we deal with the root of fear, or we trim the branches of fear. Which do you want to do? … If we can find the root of it, the expressions can wither away.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Human consciousness is the consciousness of mankind. It’s not my consciousness, your consciousness—it’s the consciousness of humanity. And, the content of that consciousness is put there by thought.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“We are conditioned by fear which is common to all mankind. We are conditioned by our pleasure which is common to all mankind. We are conditioned by our anxieties, by our loneliness, by our desperate uncertainty. All these are the factors that condition the mind.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The most destructive part of thought is under which we are living: eternal walls. Nobody seems to be able to stop it, and nobody wants to stop it … 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
“As long as you think time and thought are necessary in the psychological world—in the world of the self, in the world of psyche, in the world of inside the skin—then you will be perpetually in fear … When there is freedom from fear—you don’t want gods, you don’t want anything from anybody in the world—then you are really a free man.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“A Hindu has been programmed for the last 5,000 years to be a Hindu—or in this country you are being programmed as British, or as a Catholic, or a Protestant. We are all programmed up to a certain extent.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Belief has no place where truth is concerned … Belief brings atrophy of the brain … As long as the mind clings to belief, it is held in a prison … Psychologically, one has built a prison for oneself, by one’s own desires, by one’s own anxieties, loneliness, and so on.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Thought has created God, and then thought worships the image which thought has created—which is, to worship oneself and call it ‘God’ … If you loved, that very love is God, that very love is sacred. You won’t go outside to look for God … One has to be free of all the illusions that thought has created to see something really sacred … The ultimate goal, if you can put it that way, is to find that which is completely sacred, totally uncontaminated by thought.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The explanation is not the fact … The word is not the thing. The description is not the described … The word, the book—whatever is printed—is not the the real thing. They’re only a means of communication by people who have seen something and then want to communicate to others.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Truth cannot be told to you—the word is not that … Truth is something which is not to be measured, and it has no path to it … Truth is not a fixed point, so you can’t have a path to it.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Thought is very limited because it’s born out of knowledge … Knowledge is never complete about anything.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Be aware of this dualistic, analytical, conceptual way of living.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Separation & Conflict
“We live in a world that thought has created. We live in a world where we have given tremendous importance to thought, and thought has created all these problems.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Is society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? Of course, the unhealthy must be made healthy, that goes without saying; but why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it. Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society?” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“How can we help children to be intelligent, and free, and responsible human beings in today’s world? Are the parents intelligent and free? Are the teachers intelligent, and free, and responsible? Is the society, the educational system, helping them to be free, and responsible, and intelligent?” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Education means a holistic approach to life—cultivating the brain technologically and also cultivating the brain to be free of its own petty little self.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“What you are, the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Society is an abstraction of our personal relationship … The problem is not changing society … The real problem is: can there be a real mutation in the human mind? That is the real question. When that takes place, society will look after itself.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The physical revolution, which one is advocating all over the world at the present time, doesn’t bring about a fundamental change in man … We are talking of a revolution—not physical, but the psychological revolution … We are taking a journey together into the whole psychological structure of man—because in the understanding of that structure and the meaning of it, we can then, perhaps, bring about a change in society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The whole conceptual ideation about myself—the higher self, the lower self, the soul, all that—is the content of my consciousness … As long as that content remains, there must be separation between you and me … The content of consciousness is consciousness—the two are not separate … What is in consciousness makes up consciousness.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The mind cannot perceive truth if there is division … As long as there is division, there must be conflict … Where there is an observer separating himself from the thing he observes, there must be conflict.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The ‘me’ is the mischief in the world … Division exists because of the ‘me’—the content of consciousness. The emptying of the mind brings unity.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If you have a deep insight into conflict, it stops immediately … I’ve never had conflict in my life at all … It was a realization that conflict destroys not only the mind but the whole sensitivity of awareness.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Propaganda is mere repetition of another’s truth; it ceases to be propaganda when you yourself have discovered the truth.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Self-Inquiry
“To find out who you are you have to inquire … Our difficulty is we listen to a lot of things—we know a great deal, we have searched, asked, read, sought the advice of others, wandered the earth to find out what it is all about—but we never ask or demand of ourselves serious, deep questions. We always ask superficial questions, and so we make our life very superficial. But, if you asked questions that demand answers from yourself—so that you exercise your brain, your feelings, your whole attention—then you begin to discover for yourself without being told by anybody.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If I tell you who I am, what does it matter? … It’s like reading a menu at the window. You have to go into the restaurant and eat food. Merely standing outside and reading the menu won’t satisfy your hunger. So, to tell you who I am is really quite meaningless.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Is it possible to completely empty the mind of the ‘me’—not only at the conscious level but deep, at the deep unconscious roots of one’s being?” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Discontent is the way of inquiry, but there can be no inquiry if the mind is tethered to tradition, to ideals. Inquiry is the flame of attention. By discontent I mean that state in which the mind understands what is, the actual, and constantly inquires to discover further … One has to come to discover the whole process of knowing oneself. For the knowing of oneself is the beginning and the end of all misery.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect … If you want to discover the truth in that vital process which is your own life, you will have to inquire deeply into all these things … Unless one goes into this matter very seriously, really taking trouble, deep interest, with a passion, I’m afraid one will not be able to go very far—far in the sense not in time or in space but within oneself very deeply.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Teaching is not the mere imparting of knowledge but the cultivation of an inquiring mind … To ask the ‘right’ question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning … The real student is studying, learning, inquiring, exploring, not just until he is twenty or twenty-five, but throughout life.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“To inquire and to learn is the function of the mind … Only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learnt without experiencing it.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“You have to do this yourself. And, as most of us are second-hand or third-hand human beings, it is going to be very difficult to put away totally all that has been imposed on our minds by the religious professionals or the scientific professionals. We have to find out for ourselves.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If one understands that which is—understand not merely intellectually or verbally but see the depth of it, see the truth of it, the substance of it, the vitality of it—then perceiving that, and remaining with that, and explore into that—movement, learning, not memorizing—then there is freedom per se.” — 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
“Illumination is not a gradual process … Happiness is a side effect; it’s not an end in itself.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Will & Choice
“This is my secret: I don’t mind what happens.” — 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 … Choice must exist only when the mind is confused. When it is clear, there is no choice.” — 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 … 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
“Choice implies duality. Choice implies effort … Choice is a process of the intellect.” — 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 … We discover the unity as a living thing—not a conceptual thing—when there is this sense of choiceless attention.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Where there is love then do what you will, it will be right action.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Observer & Observed
“In the gap between the Subject and the Object lies the entire misery of humankind … When there is the observer, then there is space between the observer and the observed. That space is time because there is a distance. That time is the quality of the observer—who is the past, who is the accumulated knowledge … Now, can you observe without the observer?” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“‘Observer’ is the image which has been created. He is the entity that judges, compares, all that. Then, he looks at an object, his own experience, or his relationship with another. So, the observer is the image looking at the image which he has created about the other. So, the relationship between the observer and the observed is not a relationship, it is two images looking at each other. Now, when the observer has no image at all, then the observer is the observed. ‘What is’ is the observer, not the observer is looking at ‘what is.’” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The observer is the thinker. And, we have given such tremendous importance to the thinker, haven’t we? We live by thought, we do things by thought, we plan our life by thought, our action is motivated by thought. And, thought is worshipped throughout the world as the most extraordinarily important thing … Thought has separated itself as the thinker. The thinker says, ‘These thoughts are no good, these are better; this ideal is better than that ideal, this belief is better than that belief’. It is all the product of thought—thought which has made itself separate, fragmented itself as the thinker, as the experiencer.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“You can experiment with this for yourself very simply and very easily. Next time you are angry or jealous or greedy or violent or whatever it may be, watch yourself. In that state, ‘you’ are not. There is only that state of being. The moment, the second afterwards, you term it, you name it, you call it jealousy, anger, greed; so you have created immediately the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experienced. When there is the experiencer and the experienced, then the experiencer tries to modify the experience, change it, remember things about it and so on, and therefore maintains the division between himself and the experienced. If you don’t name that feeling—which means you are not seeking a result, you are not condemning, you are merely silently aware of the feeling—then you will see that in that state of feeling, of experiencing, there is no observer and no observed, because the observer and the observed are a joint phenomenon and so there is only experiencing.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“We must find a way of observing the whole content of consciousness without the analyzer … In analysis, there is the analyzer and the analyzed … There is this duality, the analyzer analyzing—analyzing something which he thinks is different from himself. And, the analyzer, what is he? He is the past, he is the accumulated knowledge of all the things he has analyzed. And with that knowledge, which is the past, he analyzes the present.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Observation is to watch oneself—never allowing a single thought to escape without watching it, being aware of it, giving your whole attention to that one thought … Watching is not egocentric movement—whereas thinking about yourself is egotistic, self-centered activity … Observing has no time; the other is caught in time.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“There must be an observation of myself as I am, without saying how terrible, how ugly, how beautiful, how sentimental—just to be aware of all the movement of myself … Meditation is not something you practice. It is the understanding of the whole movement of life.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“It is very important, imperative, that one understand oneself deeply, understand all the responses, the conditioning, the various temperaments, characteristics, tendencies—just to watch without the observer … To observe without the observer. That is the act of learning.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Awareness brings a quality of attention in which there is neither the observer nor the observed … You are watching. The brain is actively watching itself every minute to see that thought and time do not enter into its realm. This requires great attention, awareness.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“When one realizes the observer is the observed, the controller is the controlled, the experiencer is the experience—when one actually realizes it, not intellectually/verbally but profoundly—that very perception stops the mind.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If you are really listening, there is neither the listener nor the speaker.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
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