U.G. Krishnamurti Quotes

“Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Don't follow me, I'm lost.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“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

“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

“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

“*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man".

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Yes! is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence.
Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize
that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in
the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize
and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

It is 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 sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Q.= WHO AM I? WHO ARE YOU?
U.G = You are what you are doing RIGHT NOW!”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Charity is the filthiest invention of the human mind: first you steal what belongs to everyone; then you use the law and various other means to protect it.

You give charity to prevent the have-nots from rebelling against you. It also makes you feel less guilty. All do-gooders feel 'high' when they do good.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“What is there to understand? The significance of life? How long will it take to understand the significance and the meaning of life? 20 years? 30 years? And the same question will be here in another 20 years, I guarantee you. Until you stop asking that question. When that question is not there, you are there. So that's the reason why you keep asking the question: you do not want the question to come to an end. When that comes to an end, there will not be anybody, left there, to find out the meaning, the purpose and the significance of life.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me: 'There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?' You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your 'logically' ascertained premise, which you call truth.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“There is nothing there - no soul - there is only this question about after death. The question has to die now to find the answer - your answer; not my answer - because the question is born out of the assumption, the belief, that there is something to continue after death.”

— U.G. 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.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“The questioner has to come to an end. It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“If anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phony he is; the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“You know, this dialogue is only helpful when we come, both of us, to a point and realize that no dialogue is possible, that no dialogue is necessary. When I say 'understanding', 'seeing', they mean something different to me. Understanding is a state of being where the question isn't there any more; there is nothing there that says "now I understand!" - that's the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“You are not ready to accept the fact that you have to give up. A complete and total 'surrender'.

It is a state of hopelessness which says that there is no way out. Any movement in any direction, on any dimension, at any level, is taking you away from yourself.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. Knock off that hope and the crippling feelings of helplessness go with it.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Food, clothing and shelter - these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

We don't want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

Society or culture or whatever you might want to call it, has created us all solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its continuity and status quo.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

There is no such thing as experience here. You seem to know, you imagine. Imagination must come to an end ... I don't know how to put it. The absence of imagination, the absence of will, the absence of effort, the absence of all movement in any direction, on any level, in any dimension - THAT is the thing. That is a thing that cannot be experienced at all. It is not an experience.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, 'Is there enlightenment?' but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal of enlightenment exists, I have had to search. It is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is you. There is nothing there inside you other than that.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“I am simply pointing out that at the rate at which we are going the whole genetic engineering technology will end up in the hands of the political system to be used for the complete control and subjugation of man.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no 'how'. If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that (search), strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions: "How, how, how?"”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“The body is not interested in anything you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine.

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“You love fear. The ending of fear is death, and you don't want that to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti