No Way Out Quotes

“The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“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.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call “yourself” is fear. The “you” is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti

“The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti

“Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti

“I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti

“I have to accept the reality of present-day capitalist society however exploitative or inhumane it may seem to be. Not because it is the best system that can ever be, or because its exploitation and inhumanity are unreal, but for pure and simple reasons of survival. The acceptance has only a functional value. Nothing more and nothing less. If I do not accept social reality as it is imposed on me, I will "end up in the loony-bin singing merry melodies and loony tunes.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“God or Enlightenment is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, and all that stuff are just variations of the same theme: permanent happiness. The body can't take uninterrupted pleasure for long; it would be destroyed. Wanting a fictitious permanent state of happiness is actually a serious neurological problem.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“If the word is not the thing what the hell is it? Without the word you have no way of experiencing anything at all. Without the word you are not separate from whatever you are looking at or what is going on inside of you. The word is the knowledge. Without that knowledge you don't even know whether it is pain or pleasure that you experience, whether it is happiness or unhappiness, whether it is boredom or its opposite.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“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.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out

“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.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out