U. G. Krishnamurti Quotes

The fear of extinction will probably bring us together, not 'love' or feeling of brotherhood.

You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the center is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic.

We invent what is called a thoughtless state or an effortless state, I don't know for what reason. Why one should be in an effortless state is beyond me. But to be in an effortless state or to act effortlessly we use effort. That's absurd. We don't seem to have any way of putting ourselves into a thoughtless state except through thought.

It is the ones who believe in God, who preach peace and talk of love, who have created the human jungle. Compared to man's jungle, nature's jungle is simple and sensible! In nature animals don't kill their own kind. That is part of the beauty of nature. In this regard man is worse than the other animals. The so-called "civilized" man kills for ideals and beliefs, while the animals kill only for survival.

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.

There are no spiritual goals at all; they are simply an extension of material goals into what you imagine to be a higher, loftier plane. You mistakenly believe that by pursuing the spiritual goal you will somehow miraculously make your material goals simple and manageable. This is in actuality not possible. You may think that only inferior persons pursue material goals, that material achievements are boring, but in fact the so-called spiritual goals you have put before yourself are exactly the same.

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. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man.

Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.

"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"."

"It is your thinking that makes you feel that you are alive, that you are conscious. That is possible only when the knowledge you have about things is in operation. You have no way of knowing or finding out whether you are alive or dead. In that sense, there is no death at all, because you are not alive. You become conscious of things only when the knowledge is in operation. When the knowledge is absent, whether the person is dead or alive is of no importance to this movement of thought which comes to an end before what we call "death" takes place."

Courage is not an instrument or quality you can use to get somewhere. The stopping of doing is courage. The ending of tradition in you is courage.

It [thought] is a mechanical thing and can solve only mechanical problems. But you want to use it to understand something living; that is the problem. It is not intended for that. Human problems are something living. You cannot use thinking to solve those problems.

Nature’s laws know no reward, only punishment. The reward is only that you are in harmony with nature.

"Somewhere along the line in human consciousness, there occurred self-consciousness. (When I use the word "self" I don't mean that there is a self or a center there.) That consciousness separated man from the totality of things. Man, in the beginning, was a frightened being. He turned everything that was uncontrollable into something divine or cosmic. and worshiped it. It was in that frame of mind that he created, quote and unquote, "God." So culture, is responsible for whatever you are. I maintain that all the political institutions and ideologies we have today are the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. The spiritual teachers are in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind."

People call me an enlightened man — I detest that term — they can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I've searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular person is enlightened or not doesn't arise. I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God. 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.