Meeting Life Quotes

“Most people have lost that relationship with Nature; they look at all those mountains, valleys, the streams and the thousand trees as they pass by in their cars or walk up the hills chattering, but they are too absorbed in their own problems to look and be quiet.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practising of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one’s everyday life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Q: Why is it we all so desperately want to be loved?
Krishnamurti: Because we are so desperately empty, lonely.

Q: But you say that loving is more important than being loved.
Krishnamurti: Yes, of course – which means one must understand this emptiness, this loneliness in oneself. A mind that is self-concerned with its own ambitions, greeds, fears, guilt, suffering has no capacity to love. A mind that is divided in itself, that lives in fragments, obviously cannot love. Division implies sorrow; it is the root cause of sorrow – division between ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘they’, the black, the white, the brown and so on. So wherever there is division, fragmentation, love cannot be, because goodness is a state of non-division. The world itself is indivisible.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“The loneliness, bleakness, wretchedness you feel without this person you love existed before you fell in love. What you call love is merely stimulation, the temporary covering-up of your emptiness. You escaped from loneliness through a person, used this person to cover it up. Your problem is not this relationship but rather it is the problem of your own emptiness. Escape is very dangerous because, like some drug, it hides the real problem. It is because you have no love inside you that you continually look for love to fill you from the outside.

There is a difference between understanding the futility of this escape and deciding not to get involved in this kind of relationship. A decision is no good because it strengthens the thing you are deciding against. Understanding is quite different.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“To be aware of inattention is to be attentive. Complete attention is love. It alone can see, and the seeing is the doing.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“There is a marvellous Indian story of a boy who leaves home in search of truth. He goes to various teachers, walking endlessly in various parts of the country, every teacher asserting something or other. After many years, as an old man, after searching, searching, asking, meditating, taking certain postures, breathing rightly, fasting, no sex and all that, he comes back to his old house. As he opens the door there it is: the truth is just there. You understand? You might say, ‘It wouldn’t have been there if he hadn’t wandered all over the place.’ That’s a cunning remark, but you miss the beauty of the story if you don’t see that truth is not to be sought after. Truth is not something to be attained, to be experienced, to be held. It is there for those who can see it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Thought exists only in words, or in images. Meditation demands the most extraordinary discipline – not the discipline of suppression and conformity – but that which comes when you observe your thinking, when there is an observation of thought. That very observation brings its own extraordinary subtle discipline.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“One relies on authority because one is afraid to stand alone.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“The mind must empty itself of all the past to become highly sensitive; and it cannot be sensitive if there is the burden of the past. It is only the mind that has understood all this that can put the question. And when it puts the question it has no answer, because there is no answer. The mind has become highly sensitive and therefore supremely intelligent and intelligence has no answer. It is in itself the answer. The observer has no place because intelligence is supreme.

Then the mind is no longer seeking, no longer wanting higher experiences and therefore it is not capable of control. It does not control, because it is intelligent. It is operating, it is working. Therefore, in the very act of intelligence, the dual state disappears. All this is meditation. It is like a cloud that begins on a hilltop with a few little clouds, and, as it moves, it covers the whole sky, the valley, the mountains, the rivers, the human beings, the earth; it covers everything. That is meditation because meditation is the concern of all the living, not just one part of it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Freedom is to stand alone, unattached and unafraid, free in the understanding of desire which breeds illusion. There is a vast strength in being alone. It is the conditioned, programmed brain that is never alone, for it is filled with knowledge. That which is programmed, religiously or technologically, is always limited. This limitation is the major factor of conflict.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Routine and habit are our everyday life. Some are aware of their habits, others are not. If one becomes aware of habits—the repetitious movement of the hand or of the mind—one can put an end to them with comparative ease. But what is important in all this is to understand, not intellectually, the mechanism of habit-forming which gradually destroys or blunts all feeling.

The fear of change strengthens habit, not only physically but also in the very brain cells themselves. So having once become established in a routine, we keep going, like a tramcar along its rails. We take things for granted in all relationships, and this is one of the major factors of insensitivity. So habit becomes a natural thing. Then we say: why should one pay attention to these things that one does every day? And so inattention cultivates habit; and then we are caught. Then the problem begins of how to be free of habit. And then there is conflict. And thus conflict becomes the way of life we accept naturally!”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Imagination and romanticism deny love, for love is its own eternity. Man has sought through various gods, ideologies and hopes, something that is not bound by time. The birth of a new baby is not the indication of something eternal. Life comes and goes. There is death, there is suffering and all the mischief that man can make, and this movement of change, decay and birth is still within the cycle of time.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Innocence alone can be passionate. The innocent have no sorrow, no suffering, though they have had a thousand experiences. It is not the experiences that corrupt the mind but what they leave behind, the residue, the scars, the memories. These accumulate, pile up one on top of the other, and then sorrow begins. This sorrow is time. Where time is, innocency is not. Passion is not born of sorrow. Sorrow is experience, the experience of everyday life, the life of agony and fleeting pleasures, fears and certainties. You cannot escape from experiences, but they need not take root in the soil of the mind. These roots give rise to problems, conflicts and constant struggle. There is no way out of this but to die each day to every yesterday. The clear mind alone can be passionate. Without passion you cannot see the breeze among the leaves or the sunlight on the water. Without passion there is no love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Our brains are the result of the experience of centuries. The brain is the storehouse of memory. Without that memory, without the accumulated experience and knowledge, we should not be able to function at all as human beings. Experience—memory—is obviously necessary at a certain level, but I think it is also fairly obvious that all experience based on the conditioning of knowledge, of memory, is bound to be limited. And, therefore, experience is not a factor in liberation.

Every experience is conditioned by the past experience. So there is no new experience, it is always colored by the past. In the very process of experiencing, there is the distortion which comes into being from the past, the past being knowledge, memory, the various accumulated experiences, not only of the individual, but also of the race, the community.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Why is it that you don’t know what to do when there is desire? I’ll tell you why. Because this rigid decision of yours is still in operation. All religions have told us to deny sex, to suppress it, because they say it is a waste of energy and you must have energy to find God. But this kind of austerity and harsh suppression and conformity to a pattern does brutal violence to all our finer instincts. This kind of harsh austerity is a greater waste of energy than indulgence in sex.

Why have you made sex into a problem? Really it doesn’t matter at all whether you go to bed with someone or whether you don’t. Get on with it or drop it but don’t make a problem of it. The problem comes from this constant preoccupation. The really interesting thing is not whether we do or don’t go to bed with someone but why we have all these fragments in our lives. In one restless corner there is sex with all its preoccupations; in another corner there is some other kind of turmoil; in another a striving after this or that, and in each corner there is the continual chattering of the mind. There are so many ways in which energy is wasted.

If one corner of my life is in disorder, then the whole of my life is in disorder. If there is disorder in my life in regard to sex, then the rest of my life is in disorder. So I shouldn’t ask how to put one corner in order, but why I have broken life into so many different fragments – fragments which are in disorder within themselves and which all contradict each other. What can I do when I see so many fragments? How can I deal with them all? I have these fragments because I am not whole inside. If I go into all this without causing yet another fragment, if I go to the very end of each fragment, then in that awareness, which is looking, there is no fragmentation. Each fragment is a separate pleasure. I should ask myself whether I am going to stay in some sordid little room of pleasure all my life. Go into the slavery of each pleasure, each fragment, and say to yourself, my god, I am dependent, I am a slave to all these little corners – is that all there is to my life? Stay with it and see what happens.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“A mind that is free of any distortion is really the true religious mind, not a mind that goes to the temple, not a mind that reads the sacred books, not a mind that repeats rituals, however beautiful they may be, not a mind that is filled with images, imposed upon it or self-created.

Living is not separate from learning, and in this there is great beauty. For, after all, love is that. Love is compassion, passion, passion for everything. When there is love, there is no observer, there is no duality: the ‘you’ who love ‘me’ and the ‘I’ who love ‘you’. There is only love, though it may be loving one or the thousand; there is only love.

When there is love, then you can do no wrong, do what you will. But without love we are trying to do everything—going to the moon, the marvelous scientific discoveries—and therefore everything goes wrong. Love can only come when there is no observer. That means, when the mind is not divided in itself as the one observing and the observed, only then there is that quality of love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“We must completely set aside the idea or practice of a method. The central issue is whether the mind—it includes the heart, the brain and the whole physical organism—can live without any distortion, without any compulsion and therefore without any effort.

Our minds are distorted; they have been shaped by the culture in which we live, by the religious, economic structures, by the food we eat and so on. The mind is given a definite form, it is conditioned and this conditioning is a distortion. A mind can see very clearly, purely, completely, innocently, only when there is no distortion.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Because, after all, what we deeply want is pleasure and all our values are based on it. Pleasure is the constant factor for which we are willing to sacrifice, which we defend, for which we are willing to be violent and so on. But, if we watch pleasure, we will soon see that it, too, becomes a habit, and when that habit of pleasure is denied there is discomfort, pain and sorrow. And to avoid this we fall into another trap of pleasure.

So this is the way of life we have accepted. It is what is happening to us from morning to night, and throughout the night. So the whole of consciousness is mechanical in the sense that it is a constant movement, activity, within the borders of pleasure and pain. To go beyond these borders man has tried many different ways. But everything is soon reduced to the monotony of habit and pleasure; and if you have the energy you become very active, outwardly. Now the whole point of this is to see—actually, non-verbally—what is really taking place. To see non-verbally means to see without the observer, for the observer is the essence of habit and contradiction, which is memory. So seeing is never habitual because the seeing is non-accumulative. When you see from the accumulation you see through habits. So, seeing is action without habit.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“The mind is a current, very deep at the centre and very shallow at the periphery—like the river that has a strong current in the middle and quiet waters at its banks. But the deep current has the volume of memory behind it, and this memory is the continuity that passes the town, that gets sullied, that becomes clear again. The volume of memory gives the strength, the drive, the aggression and the refinement. It is this deep memory that knows itself to be ashes of the past, and it is this memory that has to come to an end.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“What is important is to consider life not as an inner and outer, but as a whole, as a total undivided movement. Then action has quite a different meaning, for then it is not partial. It is fragmented or partial action that adds to the cloud of misery. The good is not the opposite of evil. The good has no relation to evil, and the good cannot be pursued. It flowers only when suffering is not.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“We are not only slaves of the culture in which we have been brought up; we are also slaves to the vast cloud of misery and sorrow of all humanity, to the vastness of its confusion, violence and brutality. We never seem to pay attention to the accumulated sorrow of man. Nor are we aware of the terrible violence which has been gathering generation after generation.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“It is always this impermanency that has made man seek something beyond the hills, investing it with permanency, with divinity, with beauty, which he in himself has not. But this doesn’t answer his agonies, allay his sorrow or mischief. On the contrary it gives new life to his violence and cruelties. His gods, his utopias, his worship of the State do not end his suffering.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“To die is to love. The beauty of love is not in past remembrances or in the images of tomorrow. Love has no past and no future; what has, is memory, which is not love. Love with its passion is just beyond the range of society, which is you. Die, and it is there.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Have no shelter outwardly or inwardly; have a room, or a house, or a family, but don’t let it become a hiding place, an escape from yourself.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Can we change our life? To have no conflict at all in our life, because conflict is part of violence
—is that possible?
This constant struggle to be something is the basis of our life, the struggle to struggle.
Can we, as human beings, living in this world, change ourselves?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Probably you consider the body is not at all important. I’ve seen you eat, and you eat as if you were feeding a furnace. You may like the taste of food, but it is all so mechanical, so inattentive, the way you mix food on your plate. When you become aware of all this, your fingers, your eyes, your ears, your body all become sensitive, alive, responsive. This is comparatively easy. But what is more difficult is to free the mind from the mechanical habits of thought, feeling and action into which it has been driven by circumstances – by one’s wife, one’s children, one’s job. The mind itself has lost its elasticity. The more subtle forms of observation escape it.

This means seeing yourself actually as you are without wanting to correct yourself or change what you see or escape from it – just to see yourself actually as you are, so that the mind doesn’t fall back into another series of habits. When such a mind looks at a flower or the colour of a dress or a dead leaf falling from a tree, it is now capable of seeing the movement of that leaf as it falls and the colour of that flower vividly. So both outwardly and inwardly the mind becomes highly alive, pliable, alert; there is a sensitivity which makes the mind intelligent. Sensitivity, intelligence and freedom in action are the beauty of living.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Q: I don’t really know what it means to live beautifully. In fact, I really know nothing except a few mechanical things connected with my job; I see by talking to you that my life is pretty dull, or rather my mind is. So how can I wake up to this sensitivity, to this intelligence that makes life extremely beautiful to you?

Krishnamurti: First one has to sharpen the senses by looking, touching, observing, listening not only to the birds, to the rustle of the leaves, but also to the words that you use yourself, the feeling you have – however small and petty – for all the secret intimations of your own mind. Listen to them and don’t suppress them, don’t control them or try to sublimate them. Just listen to them. The sensitivity to the senses doesn’t mean their indulgence, doesn’t mean yielding to urges or resisting those urges, but means simply observing so that the mind is always watchful as when you walk on a railway line; you may lose your balance but you immediately get back on to the rail. So the whole organism becomes alive, sensitive, intelligent, balanced, taut.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“You can do it at any time. You can do it when you are sitting in a bus – that is, watch, observe. Be attentive to what is happening around you and what is happening in yourself – aware of the whole movement. You see, meditation is really a form of emptying the mind of everything known. Without this, you cannot know the unknown. To see anything new, totally new, the mind must be empty of all the past.

Truth, or God, or whatever name you like to give to it must be new, not something which is the result of propaganda, the result of conditioning. The Christian is conditioned by 2,000 years of propaganda, the Hindu, the Buddhist likewise conditioned. So for them God or Truth is the result of propaganda. But that is not Truth. Truth is something living every day. Therefore the mind must be emptied to look at Truth.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society

“Can’t you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship? I love someone and she loves me and we get married – that is all perfectly straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all. Can’t one have that without the other, without the tail, as it were, necessarily following?
Can’t two people be in love and both be so intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and absence of a centre that makes for conflict?

Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love. The loss of energy is in the tail, in everything that follows – jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, doubt, the fear of losing that love, the constant demand for reassurance and security. Surely it must be possible to function in a sexual relationship with someone you love without the nightmare which usually follows. Of course it is.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society