Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World Quotes

“Life has no answer. Life has only one thing, one problem— which is, living. The man who lives totally, completely, every minute without choice, neither accepting nor rejecting the thing as it is, such a man is not seeking an answer, he is not asking what the purpose of life is, nor is he seeking a way out of life. But that requires great insight into oneself.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Deeply our life is a confusion, a mess, a misery, an agony. The more sensitive we are, the more the despair, the anxiety, the guilt feeling, and naturally we want to escape from it because we haven’t found an answer; we don’t know how to get out of this confusion. We want to go to some other realm, to another dimension. We escape through music, through art, through literature, but it is just an escape; it has no reality in comparison with what we are seeking. All escapes are similar, whether through the door of a church, through God or a savior, through the door of drink or of various drugs. We must not only understand what and why we are seeking, but we must also understand this demand for deep, abiding experience, because it is only the mind that does not seek at all, that does not demand any experience in any form, that can enter into a realm, into a dimension that is totally new.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Is there security? Is there permanency which man is seeking all the time? As you notice for yourself, your body changes, the cells of the body change so often. As you see for yourself in your relationship with your wife, with your children, with your neighbor, with your state, with your community, is there anything permanent? You would like to make it permanent.

The relationship with your wife—you call it marriage, and legally hold it tightly. But is there permanency in that relationship? Because if you have invested permanency in your wife or husband, when she turns away, or looks at another, or dies, or some illness takes place, you are completely lost….

The actual state of every human being is uncertainty. Those who realize the actual state of uncertainty either see the fact and live with it there or they go off, become neurotic, because they cannot face that uncertainty. They cannot live with something that demands an astonishing swiftness of mind and heart, and so they become monks, they adopt every kind of fanciful escape. So you have to see the actual, and not escape in good works, good action, going to the temple, talking. The fact is something demands your complete attention. The fact is that all of us are insecure; there is nothing secure.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Obviously there is no love when there is no real respect, when you don’t respect another, whether he is your servant or your friend. Have you not noticed that you are not respectful, kindly, generous, to your servants, to people who are so-called “below” you ? You have respect for those above, for your boss, for the millionaire, for the man with a large house and a title, for the man who can give you a better position, a better job, from whom you can get something. But you kick those below you…
You can know love only when all these things have stopped, come to an end….How few of us are generous, forgiving, merciful! You are generous when it pays you, you are merciful when you can see something in return. When these things disappear, when these things don’t occupy your mind and when the things of the mind don’t fill your heart, then there is love; and love alone can transform the present madness and insanity in the world—not systems, not theories…”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“A man who loves obviously has no enmity and to all these things he is indifferent. Sympathy, forgiveness, the relationship of possessiveness, jealousy, and fear—all these things are not love. They are all of the mind, are they not?… The mind can only corrupt love, it cannot give birth to love, it cannot give beauty. You can write a poem about love, but that is not love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“When we say we love somebody, what do we mean? We mean we possess that person. From that possession arises jealousy, because if I lose him or her what happens? I feel empty, lost; therefore I legalize possession; I hold him or her. From holding, possessing that person, there is jealousy, there is fear, and all the innumerable conflicts that arise from possession. Surely such possession is not love, is it?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“We want a purpose so that we can guide our everyday life towards an end. That is obviously what we mean by purpose. But if I understand how to live, then the very living is in itself sufficient, is it not? Do we then want a purpose? If I love you, if I love another, is that not sufficient in itself? Do I then want a purpose? Surely, we want a purpose only when we do not understand or when we want a mode of conduct with an end in view. After all, most of us are seeking a way of life, a way of conduct, and we either look to others, to the past, or we try to find a mode of behavior through our own experience. When we look to our own experience for a pattern of behavior, our experience is always conditioned, is it not? However wide the experiences one may have had, unless these experiences dissolve the past conditioning, any new experiences only further strengthen the past conditioning. That is a fact which we can discuss. And if we look to another, to the past, to a guru, to an ideal, to an example for a pattern of behavior, we are merely forcing the extraordinary vitality of life into a mold, into a particular shape, and thereby we lose the swiftness, the intensity, the richness of life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“But after all, truth is something that cannot be given to you. You have to find it out for yourself. And to find it out for yourself, you must be a law to yourself, you must be a guide to yourself, not the political man that is going to save the world, not the communist, not the leader, not the priest, not the sannyasi, not the books; you have to live, you have to be a law to yourself. And therefore no authority—which means completely standing alone, not outwardly, but inwardly completely alone, which means no fear.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Mere revolt does not answer the problem. What answers the problem is to bring about order within oneself, order which is living, not a routine. Routine is deadly. You go to an office the moment you pass out of your college—if you can get a job. Then for the next forty to fifty years, you go to the office every day. You know what happens to such a mind? You have established a routine, and you repeat that routine; and you encourage your child to repeat that routine. Any man alive must revolt against it. But you will say, “I have responsibility; placed as I am, I cannot leave it even though I would like to.” And so the world goes on, repeating the monotony, the boredom of life, its utter emptiness.
Against all this, intelligence is revolting.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Can’t two people be in love and both be so intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and absence of a center that makes for conflict? Conflict is not 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, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Peace is a state of mind; it is the freedom from all desire to be secure. The mind-heart that seeks security must always be in the shadow of fear. Our desire is not only for material security, but much more for inner, psychological security, and it is this desire to be inwardly secure through virtue, through belief, through a nation, that creates limiting and so conflicting groups and ideas.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“We must concern ourselves not with what is beyond life, or what is life, or what is the purpose of life, but rather with the understanding of this complex existence of everyday life, because that is the foundation upon which we must build.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“First of all, is there such a thing as inward security in relationship, in our affections, in the ways of our thinking? Is there the ultimate reality which every man wants, hopes, pins his faith to? Because the moment you want security, you will invent a god, an idea, an ideal, which will give you the feeling of security; but it may not be real at all—it may be merely an idea, a reaction, a resistance to the obvious fact of uncertainty. So one has to inquire into this question of whether there is security at all at any level of our lives. First, inwardly, because if there is no security outwardly, then our relationship with the world will be entirely different; then we shall not identify ourselves with any group, with any nation, or even with any family.

It is the desire to be secure, when there is probably no security at all, that breeds conflict. If psychologically you see the truth that there is no security of any kind, of any type, at any level, there is no conflict. Then, you are creative, volcanic in your action, explosive in your ideas; you are not tethered to anything. Then you are living.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“So, if we really want to create a different world, a different relationship between human beings, a different attitude toward life, it is essential that we should first understand ourselves, is it not? This does not mean self-centered concentration, which leads to utter misery. What I am suggesting is that without self-knowledge, without deeply knowing oneself, all inquiry, all thought, all conclusions, opinions, and values have very little meaning. Most of us are conditioned— conditioned as Christians, as Muslims, or what you will, and within that narrow area we have our being. Our minds are conditioned by society, by education, by the culture about us, and without understanding the total process of that conditioning, our search, our knowledge, our inquiry can only lead to further mischief, to greater misery, which is what is actually happening.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Is it not very important, while we are young, to be loved and to love? It seems to me that most of us neither love nor are loved. And I think it is essential, while we are young, to understand this problem very seriously because it may be that while we are young, we can be sensitive enough to feel it, to know its quality, to know its perfume and perhaps, when we grow older, it will not be entirely destroyed. So, let us consider the question—that is, not that you should not be loved, but that you should love. What does it mean? Is it an ideal? Is it something far away, unattainable? Or is it something that can be felt by each one at odd moments of the day?

To feel it, to be aware, to know the quality of sympathy, the quality of understanding, to help naturally, to aid another without any motive, to be kind, to be generous, to have sympathy, to care for something, to care for a dog, to be sympathetic to the villager, to be generous to your friend, to be forgiving, is that what we mean by love? Or is love something in which there is no sense of resentment, something which is everlasting forgiveness?

And is it not possible while we are young, to feel it? Most of us, while we are young, do feel it—a sense of outward agony, sympathy to the villager, to the dog, to those who are little. And should it not be constantly tended? Should you not always have some part of the day when you are helping another or tending a tree or garden or helping in the house or in the hostel so that as you grow into maturity, you will know what it is to be considerate naturally—not with an enforced considerateness that is merely a negative word for one’s own happiness, but with that considerateness that is without motive.

So, should you not when you are young, know this quality of real affection? It cannot be brought into being; you have to have it, and those who are in charge of you, like your guardian, your parents, your teachers, must also have it. Most people have not got it. They are concerned with their achievements, with their longings, with their success, with their knowledge, and with what they have done. They have built up their past into such colossal importance that it ultimately destroys them.

So, should you not, while you are young, know what it is to take care of the rooms, to care for a number of trees that you yourself dig and plant so that there is a feeling, a subtle feeling of sympathy, of care, of generosity, the actual generosity—not the generosity of the mere mind—that means you give to somebody the little that you may have? If that is not so, if you do not feel that while you are young, it will be very difficult to feel that when you are old. So, if you have that feeling of love, of generosity, of kindness, of gentleness, then perhaps you can awaken that in others.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“I depend on my son because I want him to be something that I am not. He is the fulfillment of all my hopes, my desires; he is my immortality, my continuation. So my relationship with my son, with my wife, with my children, with my neighbors, is a state of psychological dependency, and I am fearful of being in a state in which there is no dependence. I do not know what that means, therefore I depend on books, on relationship, on society, I depend on property to give me security, position, prestige. And if I do not depend on any of these things, then I depend on the experiences that I have had, on my own thoughts, on the greatness of my own pursuits.

The problem is not how not to depend, but just to see the fact that we do depend. Where there is attachment there is no love. Because you do not know how to love, you depend, and…where there is dependency there is fear. I am talking of psychological dependency, not of your dependence on the milkman to bring you milk, or your dependence on the railway, or on a bridge. It is this inward psychological dependency—on ideas, on people, on property that breeds fear. So, you cannot be free from fear as long as you do not understand relationship, and relationship can be understood only when the mind watches all its relationships, which is the beginning of self-knowledge.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am; but as most of us do not like what we are, we begin to discipline, either positively or negatively, what we perceive in the mirror of relationship.

“If you recognize the illusion then you can, by putting it aside, give your attention to the understanding of relationship. But if you seek security in relationship, it becomes an investment in comfort, in illusion—and the greatness of relationship is its very insecurity. By seeking security in relationship you are hindering its function, which brings its own peculiar actions and misfortunes.

When insecurity creeps into dependency, as it inevitably does, then that particular relationship is cast aside and a new one is taken on in the hope of finding lasting security; but there is no security in relationship, and dependency only breeds fear. Without understanding the process of security and fear, relationship becomes a binding hindrance, a way of ignorance. Then all existence is struggle and pain, and there is no way out of it save in right thinking, which comes through self-knowledge.

As long as the mind merely uses relationship for its own security, that relationship is bound to create confusion and antagonism. Is it possible to live in relationship without the idea of demand, of want, of gratification?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“If I am a parent, what is my relationship with my child? First of all, have I any relationship at all? The child happens to be my son or my daughter, but is there actually any relationship, any contact, companionship, communion between myself and my child, or am I too busy earning money, or whatever it is, and therefore pack him off to school? So I really have no contact or communion at all with the boy or the girl, have I? If I am a busy parent, as parents generally are, and I merely want my son to be something, a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer, have I any relationship with him even though I have produced him?

Do parents ever ask themselves why they have children? Do they have children to perpetuate their name, to carry on their property? Do they want children merely for the sake of their own delight, to satisfy their own emotional needs? If so, then the children become a mere projection of the desires and fears of their parents.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“You do not say, “I love the whole world,” but when you know how to love one, you know how to love the whole. Because we do not know how to love one, our love of humanity is fictitious. When you love, there is neither one nor many: there is only love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“One feels, in this possessive relationship, enriched, creative, and active; one feels one’s own little flame of being is increased by another and so in order not to lose this source of completeness one fears the loss of the other, and so possessive fears come into being with all their resulting problems. Thus in this relationship of psychological dependence, there must always be conscious or unconscious fear, suspicion, which often lies hidden in pleasant-sounding words..

Though one is dependent on another, there is yet the desire to be inviolate, to be whole. The complex problem in relationship is how to love without dependence, without friction and conflict; how to conquer the desire to isolate oneself, to withdraw from the cause of conflict. If we depend for our happiness on another, on society, or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort. Though, intellectually, we may perceive that life is a continual process of flux, mutation, necessitating constant change, yet emotionally or sentimentally we cling to the established and comforting values; hence there is a constant battle between change and the desire for permanency. Is it possible to put an end to this conflict?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Most of us seek security of some kind because our lives are an endless conflict, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. The boredom of life and the anxiety of life; the despair of existence; the feeling that you want to be loved, and you are not loved; the shallowness, the pettiness, the travail of everyday existence—that is our life. In that life there is danger, there is apprehension; nothing is certain; there is always the uncertainty of tomorrow. So you are all the time pursuing security, consciously or unconsciously; you want to find a permanent state, psychologically first and outwardly afterwards—it is always psychological first, not outward. You want a permanent state where you will not be disturbed by anything, by any fear, by any anxiety, by any sense of uncertainty, by any sense of guilt. That is what most of us want. That is what most of us seek outwardly as well as inwardly.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“One cannot know oneself, what one actually is except in relationship. Anger, jealousy, envy, lust—all such reactions exist only in one’s relationship with people, with things, and with ideas. If there is no relationship at all, if there is complete isolation, one cannot know oneself. The mind can isolate itself, thinking that it is somebody, which is a state of lunacy, unbalance, and in that state it cannot know itself. It merely has ideas about itself, like the idealist who is isolating himself from the fact of what he is by pursuing what he should be. That is what most of us are doing. Because relationship is painful, we want to isolate ourselves from this pain, and in the isolating process we create the ideal of what we should be, which is imaginary, an invention of the mind. So we can know ourselves as we actually are, consciously as well as unconsciously, only in relationship, and that is fairly obvious.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Sex is a problem because it would seem that in the act there is complete absence of the self. In that moment you are happy because there is the cessation of self-consciousness, of the ‘me’, and desiring more of it—more of the abnegation of the self in which there is complete happiness through full fusion, integration—naturally it becomes all-important. Isn’t that so? Because it is something that gives me unadulterated joy, complete self-forgetfulness, I want more and more of it. Now, why do I want more of it? Because, everywhere else I am in conflict….In all our relationships with property, with people, with ideas there is conflict, pain, struggle, misery…. Naturally you want more of it because it gives you happiness, while all the rest leads you to misery…

So, the problem is not sex, surely, but how to be free from the self. You have tasted that state of being in which the self is not, if only for a few seconds, if only for a day,…so there is the constant longing for more of that self-free state…

Until you resolve the whole content of that conflict, this one release of the self, through sex, will remain a hideous problem…”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“To love a person with your whole being, with your mind, heart, and body, requires great intensity; and when love is intense, desire soon disappears. But most of us have never had this intensity about anything, except about our own profit, conscious or unconscious; we never feel for anything without seeking something else out of it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Why is it that whatever we touch we turn into a problem? We have made God a problem, we have made love a problem, we have made relationship, living a problem, and we have made sex a problem. Why? Why is everything we do a problem, a horror? Why are we suffering? Why has sex become a problem? Why do we submit to living with problems, why do we not put an end to them? Why do we not die to our problems instead of carrying them day after day, year after year? Sex is certainly a relevant question but there is the primary question: why do we make life into a problem? Working, sex, earning money, thinking, feeling, experiencing—you know, the whole business of living—why is it a problem? Is it not essentially because we always think from a particular point of view, from a fixed point of view?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“We think that if one loves one person, one can’t love the whole, and if one loves mankind then one can’t possibly love the particular. This all indicates, does it not, that we have ideas about what love should be? This is again the pattern, the code developed by the culture in which we live, or the pattern that one has cultivated for oneself. So for us, ideas about love matter much more than the fact; we have ideas of what love is, what it should be, what it is not.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Relationship is the mirror in which you see yourself as you are. If you are capable of looking at yourself as you are without any evaluation, then there is the cessation of fear, and out of that comes an extraordinary sense of love. Love is something that cannot be cultivated; love is not a thing to be bought by the mind. If you say, “I am going to practice being compassionate,” then compassion is a thing of the mind, and therefore not love. Love comes into being darkly, unknowingly, fully, when we understand this whole process of relationship. Then the mind is quiet, it does not fill the heart with the things of the mind, and therefore that which is love can come into being.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Relationship is a process of self-revelation, of self-knowledge. This self-revelation is painful, demanding constant adjustment, pliability of thought-emotion. It is a painful struggle, with periods of enlightened peace..”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“If we look into our lives and observe relationship, we see it is a process of building resistance against another, a wall over which we look and observe the other; but we always retain the wall and remain behind it, whether it be a psychological wall, a material wall, an economic wall or a national wall. So long as we live in isolation, behind a wall, there is no relationship with another….

The world is so disruptive, there is so much sorrow, so much pain, war, destruction, misery, that we want to escape and live within the walls of security, of our own psychological being. So, relationship with most of us is actually a process of isolation, and obviously such relationship builds a society that is also isolating. That is exactly what is happening throughout the world: you remain in your isolation and stretch your hand over the wall….”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World

“Relationship is a mirror in which I can see myself. That mirror can either be distorted, or it can be ‘as is’, reflecting that which is. But most of us see in relationship, in that mirror, things we would rather see; we do not see what is.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World