Krishnamurti Quotes

“K gave talks in the usual places in India between October and March ’64. There is a particularly memorable passage in the fourth talk4 he gave in Bombay on February 16:
I am going to describe a scene that took place [at Rajghat]. It actually happened. We [meaning himself] were sitting on the bank of a river, very wide, of an evening. The crows were coming back from across the river, and the moon was just coming over the trees. And there was a man sitting beside us. He was a sanyasi. He did not notice the water and the moon on the water. He did not notice the song of that village man, he did not notice the crows coming back; he was so absorbed in his own problem. And he began to talk quietly with a tremendous sense of sorrow. He was a lustful man, he said, brutal in his demands, never satisfied, always demanding, asking, pushing, driving; and he was striving and he was driven for many years to conquer it. And at last he did the most brutal thing to himself; and from that day he was no longer a man. And as you listened you felt an extraordinary sorrow, a tremendous shock, that a man in search of God could mutilate himself for ever. He had lost all feeling, all sense of beauty. All that he was concerned with was to reach God. He tortured himself, butchered himself, destroyed himself, in order to find that thing which he called God. And as it got dark, the stars came out full, wide, with immense space; and he was totally unaware. And most of us live that way. We have brutalized ourselves through different ways, so completely. We have formed ideas, we live with formulas. All our actions, all our feelings, all our activities are shaped, controlled, subjugated, dominated by the formulas which society, the saints, the religious, the experiences that's one has had, have established. These formulas shape our lives, our activity, our being.”
― Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfillment

“It was over thirty years since I had heard K speak, but on an impulse I went to his first evening talk at the Friends Meeting House on June 7. While I seemed to understand what he was saying while he was actually talking I could not afterwards have given any coherent idea of it to someone who had never heard him. Even now I find I understand him with that sense, that intuition, which grasps the meaning of difficult poetry rather than through my intellect. But on this occasion I was watching him far more intently than I was listening. The hall was packed; people were standing at the back. I did not see him come on to the platform; at one moment the solitary hard chair placed in the centre of the platform was empty; the next moment he was sitting there on his hands, having made no sound on entering, a very slight figure, impeccably dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, feet in highly polished brown shoes placed neatly side by side. He was alone on the platform. (He is never introduced and he never has any notes.) There was complete silence in the hall as a strong vibration of expectancy ran through the audience. He sat there quite silent, his body still, assessing his audience with slight movements of his head from side to side. One minute; two minutes; I began to panic for him. Had he broken down altogether? I was prickling all over in an anguish of concern for him when he suddenly began, unhurriedly in his rather lilting voice with its faint Indian accent, startling the silence.”
― Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfillment

“The fact is, there is death; the organism comes to an end. And the fact is, there may or may not be a continuity. But I want to know now, while I am healthy, vital, and alive, what it is to live richly; and I also want to find out now what it means to die—not wait for an accident or a disease to carry me off. I want to know what it means to die—living to enter the house of death. Not theoretically but actually, I want to experience the extraordinary thing it must be—to enter into the unknown, cutting off all the known.
Not to meet with the known, not to meet a friend on the other side—that is what is frightening us. I am afraid to let go of all the things I have known, the family, the virtue that I have cultivated, the property, the position, the power, the sorrow, the joy, everything that I have gathered, which is all the known—I am afraid to let all that go, totally, deep down, right from the depths of my being, and to be with the unknown—which is, after all, death ... So the question is, can I put away all the known? I cannot put away the known by will, by volition, because that entails a maker of the will, an entity who says, ‘This is right and this is wrong’, ‘This I want and this I do not want’. Such a mind is acting from the known, is it not? It says, ‘I want to enter the extraordinary thing which is death, the unknowable, and so I must relinquish the known’. Such a person then searches the various corners of the mind, in order to push aside the known. This action allows the entity who deliberately pushed away the known, to remain. But as that entity is itself the result of the known, it can never experience or enter that extraordinary state ... Can I, who am the result of the known, enter into the unknown which is death? If I want to do it, it must be done while living, surely, not at the last moment ... While living, to enter the house of death is not just a morbid idea; it is the only solution. While living a rich, full life—whatever that means—or while living a miserable, impoverished life, can we not know that which is not measurable, that which is only glimpsed by the experiencer in rare moments? ... Can the mind die from moment to moment to everything that it experiences, and never accumulate?”
― Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfillment

“K talked every Saturday evening and Sunday morning in the Oak Grove throughout August. He was asked two pertinent questions during these talks. The first was: ‘Great minds have never been able to agree as to what is the ultimate reality. What do you say? Does it exist at all?’ Part of K’s answer to this was: ‘What do you say? Is not that much more important: what you think. You say that great minds have said there is and there is not. Of what value is that?’ He went on to explain that only one’s own mind was capable of finding out, ‘But your mind is crammed with knowledge, with information, with experience, with memories; and with that mind you try to find out. Surely, it is only when the mind is creatively empty that it is capable of finding out whether there is an ultimate reality or not.’
The second question was: ‘Does not the process of constant self-awareness lead to self-centredness?’ It does, K replied in effect, as long as you are consciously or unconsciously concerned with a result, with success; you are miserable, frustrated, and feel there is a state in which you can be happy, fulfilled, complete, so you use awareness to get what you want. Through awareness, self-analysis, reading, studying, you hope to dissolve the ego and thereby become happy, enlightened, liberated—one of the elite. So the more you are concerned with gaining an end, the greater the self-centredness. But in understanding why the mind seeks a reward, a satisfying result, there is a possibility of going beyond the self-enclosing activities of thought.”
― Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfillment