As One Is Quotes

“A man who lives never asks, "What is living?" and he has no theories about living. It is only the half-alive who talk about the purpose of life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. Such a mind does not seek because there is nothing to seek; being free, such a mind is completely still without a want, without movement.
But this state is not to be achieved; it isn't a thing that you buy through discipline; it doesn't come into being by giving up sex, or practicing a certain yoga.
It comes into being only when there is understanding of the ways of the self, the 'me', which shows itself through the conscious mind in everyday activity, and also in the unconscious. What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories - to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask how to be free, you are not listening.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“Why am I violent, competitive, ambitious, acquisitive? Why is there in me this constant struggle to become? Obviously, I am running away, taking flight from something through ambition, through acquisitiveness, through wanting to be a success. I am afraid of something, which is making me do all these things. I am not for the moment concerned with the fear of darkness, of public opinion, of what somebody may or may not say of me, because all that is very superficial; I am trying to find out what it is that fundamentally making me afraid, which in turn drives me to be ambitious, competitive, acquisitive, envious, thereby creating animosity and all the rest of it.
First of all, it seems to me that we are very lonely people. I am very lonely, inwardly empty, and I don't like that state; I am afraid of it, so I shun it, I run away from it. The very running away creates fear, and to avoid that fear, I indulge in various kinds of action. There is obviously this emptiness in me, in you, from which the mind is escaping through action, through ambition, through the urge to be somebody, to acquire more knowledge - you know, the whole business of violence. And without running away, can the mind look at this emptiness, this extraordinary sense of loneliness, which is the ultimate expression of the self? - the self being the entity, the self-consciousness which is empty when it doesn't run.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“Our culture is based on will—the will to be, to become, to achieve, to fulfill—therefore, in each one of us there is always the entity who is trying to change, control, alter that which he observes. But is there a difference between that which he observes and himself, or are they one? This is a thing that cannot be merely accepted. It must be thought of, gone into with tremendous patience, gentleness, hesitancy, so that the mind is no longer separated from that which it thinks, so that the observer and the observed are psychologically one. As long as I am psychologically separate from that which I perceive in myself as envy, I try to overcome envy; but is that ‘I’, the maker of effort to overcome envy, different from envy? Or are they both the same, only the ‘I’ has separated himself from envy in order to overcome it because he feels envy is painful, and for various other reasons? But that very separation is the cause of envy. Perhaps you are not used to this way of thinking, and it is a little bit too abstract. But a mind that is envious can never be tranquil because it is always comparing, always trying to become something which it is not; and if one really goes into this problem of envy radically, profoundly, deeply, one must inevitably come upon this problem—whether the entity that wishes to be rid of envy is not envy itself. When one realizes that it is envy itself that wants to get rid of envy, then the mind is aware of that feeling called envy without any sense of condemning or trying to get rid of it. Then from that the problem arises: Is there a feeling if there is no verbalization? Because the very word envy is condemnatory, is it not? Am I saying too much all at once? Is there a feeling of envy if I don’t name that feeling? By the very naming of it, am I not maintaining that feeling? The feeling and the naming are almost simultaneous, are they not? And is it possible to separate them so that there is only a sense of reaction without naming? If you really go into it, you will find that when there is no naming of that feeling, envy totally ceases—not”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“This society conditions the mind to a particular pattern of thought, the pattern of self-improvement, self-adjustment, self-sacrifice, and only those who are capable of breaking away from all conditioning can discover that which is not measurable by the mind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“To understand oneself requires, not impetuous urges, conclusions, but great patience. One must go slowly, millimeter by millimeter, never missing a step - which doesn't mean that you must everlastingly keep awake. You can't. It does imply that you must watch and drop what you have watched, let it go and pick it up again, so that the mind does not become a mere accumulation of what it has learned but is capable of watching each thing anew.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“We are human beings, not Asiatics and Americans, Russians and Germans, communists and capitalists. We all have the same human problems.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“So the question now is: Why does the mind think in terms of habit, the habit of relationship, the habit of ideas, the habit of beliefs, and so on? Why? Because essentially it is seeking to be secure, to be safe, to be permanent, is it not? The mind hates to be uncertain, so it must have habits as a means of security. A mind that is secure can never be free from habit, but only the mind that is completely insecure -- which doesn't mean ending up in an asylum or a mental hospital.
The mind that is completely insecure, that is uncertain, inquiring, perpetually finding out, that is dying to every experience, to everything it has acquired, and is therefore in a state of not-knowing -- only such a mind can be free of habit, and that is the highest form of thinking.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“Is it possible, then, to be in a state of experiencing without the experiencer? Do you understand? Can the mind experience ugliness, beauty, or what you will, without the entity who says, 'I have experienced'?

Because that which is Truth, that which is God, that which is immeasurable, can never be experienced as long as there is an experiencer. The experiencer is the entity of recognition; and if I am capable of recognizing that which is truth, then I have already experienced it, I already know it; therefore, it is not truth. That is the beauty of truth; it remains timelessly the unknown, and a mind that is the result of the known can never grasp it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“This whole problem of naming a feeling, of giving it a term, is part of the problem of consciousness. Take a word like 'love'. How immediately your mind rejoices in that word! It has such significance, such beauty, ease, and all the rest of it. And the word 'hate' immediately has quite another significance, something to be avoided, to be got rid of, to be shunned, and so on. So words have an extraordinary psychological effect on the mind, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Now, to go beyond, to transcend all that, requires tremendous attention. This total attention, in which there is no choice, no sense of becoming, of changing, altering, wholly frees the mind from the process of self-consciousness; there is then no experiencer who is accumulating, and it is only then that the mind can be truly said to be free from sorrow. It is the accumulation that is the cause of sorrow.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“A man who lives never asks, “What is living?” and he has no theories about living. It is only the half-alive who talk about the purpose of life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“Sorrow may be controlled, disciplined, subjugated, rationalized, super-refined, but the potential quality of sorrow is still there; and to be free from sorrow, there must be freedom from this potentiality, from this seed of the ‘I’, the self, from the whole process of becoming.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“For beauty there must be austerity and a total abandonment, and there cannot be abandonment if there is any sense of ambition expressing itself as an achievement. When there is austerity, there is simplicity, and only the mind that is simple can abandon itself, and out of this abandonment comes love. Such a state is beauty. But of that we are totally unaware. Our civilization, our culture, is based on arrogance, on the sense of achievement, and in society we are at each other's throats, violently competing to achieve, to acquire, to dominate, to become somebody. These are obvious psychological facts.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning

“So, the questioner wants to know why it is that he cannot go beyond all these superficial wrangles of the mind. For the simple reason that, consciously or unconsciously, the mind is always seeking something, and that very search brings violence, competition, the sense of utter dissatisfaction. It is only when the mind is completely still that there is a possibility of touching the deep waters.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“The mind hates to be uncertain, so it must have habits as a means of security.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“Anything I fight, I am giving life to. If I fight an idea, I am giving life to that idea; if I fight you, I am giving you life to fight me.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“But when you are completely attentive with that attention in which there is no object because there is no process of acquiring, no cultivation of the will to achieve a result, then you will find that the mind is extraordinarily steady, inwardly still—and it is only the still mind that is free to discover or let that reality come into being.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“Now, what makes the mind petty? Surely, the mind is narrow, limited, shallow, petty, as long as it is acquisitive. It may give up worldly things and become acquisitive in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, but it is still petty because in acquiring, it develops the will to achieve, to gain, and this very will to achieve constitutes pettiness.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“To go beyond, there must be the cessation of this process. But if you say, “How am I to go beyond?” then the “how” becomes the method, the practice, which is still progress, therefore there is no going beyond but only the refinement of consciousness in sorrow. I hope you are getting this.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“What is confusion? Confusion exists only when there is the fact plus what I think about the fact: my opinion about the fact, my disregard of the fact, my evasion of the fact, my evaluation of the fact, and so on. If I can look at the fact without the additive quality, then there is no confusion.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“In attention there is no focusing, no choice; there is complete awareness without any interpretation. And if we can listen so attentively, completely, to what is being said, then that very attention brings about the miracle of change within the mind itself.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“its religions do not make a religious man.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“What is significant is not with what the mind is occupied but the fact of its occupation, whether it be with the kitchen, with the children, with amusement, with what kind of food you are going to have, or with virtue, with God.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“That is the beauty of truth; it remains timelessly the unknown, and a mind that is the result of the known can never grasp it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“There is progress in self-improvement—I can be better tomorrow, more kind, more generous, less envious, less ambitious. But does self-improvement bring about a complete change in one’s thinking? Or is there no change at all, but only progress?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“In the moment of attention the self, the ‘me’, is absent, and it is that moment of attention that is good, that is love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“If you want to find a meaning, give full attention.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories—to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no “how” to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition

“Only the mind that is not occupied with desire can understand desire.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Condition