55 famous Jiddu Krishnamurti quotes (about life and love)
Although he is not as famous as other philosophers, Jiddu Krishnamurti has been one of the most prominent thinkers of recent times. This writer and speaker of Hindu origin reflected on life and existence, and left a legacy that today we collect with some of his thoughts.
We have compiled a list with the 55 best phrases of Jiddu Krishnamurti, which summarize his thoughts and in which he reflects on life, love or beliefs.
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The best 55 phrases of Jiddu Krishnamurti
Below you have a selection of the most famous Jiddu Krishnamurti phrases, which will invite you to reflect on existence and yourself.
1. The religion of all men must be to believe in themselves.
One of the best phrases of Jiddu Krishnamurti, through which invites self-confidence and belief in yourself.
2. Only when the mind is free of ideas and beliefs can it act correctly.
With this reflection he expresses that thought flows better and is purer when it is not influenced by beliefs or prejudices.
3. The meaning of life is to live.
A short and simple phrase, but one that conveys a very important message: let's not worry about the meaning of life, let's live it.
4. To love is not to ask for something in return, even not to feel that you are giving something and that is the only love that can know freedom.
One of Krishnamurti's phrases about love, in which he expresses that true love is that which is given unconditionally.
5. Passion is a pretty scary thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
Passion is certainly a powerful force that moves us and can take us very far, for better or for worse.
6. Self-improvement is the very antithesis of freedom and learning. Find out how to live without comparison and you will see something extraordinary happen.
Sometimes it is good to let go and not worry so much about seeking perfection, because if we are very demanding we do not enjoy learning.
7. Understanding life is understanding ourselves and this is jointly the beginning and the end of education.
What Krishnamurti does not tell us in this reflection is whether we can fully understand life.
8. One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
Indeed, endings hurt us more than new beginnings, as these can also bring good.
9. Love offers itself just as a flower gives its perfume.
Another of Krishnamurti's phrases about love, a recurring theme in his thoughts.
10. For the hope of tomorrow we sacrifice today, however happiness is always in the now.
We can make small sacrifices with the future in mind, but without forgetting to live and enjoy the present moment.
11. No matter how intense the storm, the spirit must always remain impassive.
A phrase by Krishnamurti to remember in those moments when it is necessary to remain calm.
12. Wisdom is not an accumulation of memories, but a supreme vulnerability to the true.
Another of the deepest reflections of this thinker, who reminds us that true knowledge is to surrender to the truth.
13. Avoiding a problem only serves to intensify it, and in this process self-understanding and freedom are abandoned.
We must face the problems and solve them, otherwise the result may be worse and it may limit us.
14. The end is the beginning of all things, suppressed and hidden. Waiting to be thrown through the rhythm of pain and pleasure.
Krishnamurti again expresses to us with this phrase that the end is only the beginning of something.
15. What is decisive in bringing peace to the world is our daily conduct.
Another of Krishnamurti's best phrases, in which he expresses that it is our daily actions that contribute to a better world.
16. When you listen to someone, completely, attentively, you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what they are transmitting, to the whole, not part of it.
To really listen to someone is to pay your full attention and understand that they are transmitting more than words to you.
17. We cultivate the mind by making it more and more ingenious, more and more subtle, more cunning, less sincere and more devious and unable to face facts.
It is Krishnamurti's way of expressing that "ignorance is bliss", since a more ingenious mind also gives us new ways of complicating ourselves.
18. If we remain totally attentive to what it is, we will understand it and we will be free from it; But to be attentive to what we are, we have to stop fighting for what we are not.
In order to reach self-knowledge, we must first accept ourselves as we are, without the ties that pursuing being other people entails.
19. The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end. You do not reach an achievement, you do not reach a conclusion. It is a river without end
Again another phrase from Krishnamurti about knowing oneself, which indicates that it is a search that always accompanies us.
20. Love is not reaction. If I love you because you love me, there is a simple deal, something that can be bought in the market; that's not love.
Again the author reflects on love and its unconditionality to make it true.
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21. Learning about yourself requires humility, it requires never assuming that you know something, it is about learning about yourself from the beginning and never accumulating.
One of Krishnamurti's best reflections, reminding us that learning is always humility.
22. Between two solutions, always choose the more generous one.
Generosity is vital to making this world a better place, this great thinker knew well.
23. Sowing wheat once, you will reap once. Planting a tree, you reap tenfold. Instructing the worn, you will harvest one hundred times.
Education and training are vital to achieve great achievements, which can only be achieved by giving the necessary tools to future generations.
24. If you have clarity, if you are an inner light to yourself, you will never follow anyone.
The clarity that self-knowledge gives us serves as a guide and gives us freedom.
25. It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a deeply ill society.
One of Krishnamurti's most famous phrases, which reminds us that it is not always good to fit in.
26. Life is an extraordinary mystery. Not the mystery in books, not the mystery that people talk about, but a mystery that one has to discover for oneself; and that is why it is so important for you to understand the small, the limited, the trivial, and go beyond all that.
Again he talks about the importance of self-knowledge to understand life and the world around us.
27. Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not looking for it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity.
True happiness is in the little moments that we enjoy without thinking and without searching.
28. When you lose your relationship with nature and the open skies, you lose your relationship with other human beings.
Getting away from nature also means getting closer to the individuality that prevents us from relating to others.
29. When one is attentive to everything, one becomes sensitive, and to be sensitive is to have an internal perception of beauty, it is to have the sense of beauty.
When we look at the world with sensitivity It is when we can perceive the beauty that is in it.
30. The idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of who we really are.
The idea that we have of ourselves or of what we could be is a way of not accepting who we really are.
31. Be careful with the man who says he knows.
People who really have the knowledge apply it, without having to advertise that they have it. True wisdom is humble.
32. I hold that truth is a pathless land and you cannot reach it by any path, by any religion or by any sect.
Krishnamurti was very critical of religions, and this is one of the phrases in which he expresses it.
33. Fear corrupts intelligence and is one of the causes of egotism.
Fear is stronger than intelligence and leads us to think of ourselves.
34. What is needed, instead of escaping, controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is to understand fear; it means looking at him, learning about him, going to contact him. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape it.
Another phrase by Krishnamurti about fear, in which he reflects on how to face it in order to overcome it.
35. No book is sacred, I can assure you. Just like the newspaper, they are just pages printed on paper, and there is nothing sacred in them either.
Again the author does a critique of religions and different beliefsfor true knowledge is not found in his books.
36. The process of fighting something only feeds and strengthens what we fight against.
Sometimes confrontation only serves to make what we are trying to overthrow worse.
37. If one wants to understand and get rid of fear, one must also understand pleasure, the two are related to each other. They are two sides of the same coin. One cannot be free from one without being free from the other: if we are denied pleasure, all psychological torture will appear.
With this phrase the author expresses the relationship between fear and pleasure, because accompanied by pleasure there is the fear of losing it.
38. We always cover the interior nothing with some of the so-called capital sins.
According to Krishnamurti some sins are an attempt to fill a void in us.
39. When the mind is completely silent, both on the superficial and deep levels; the unknown, the immeasurable can reveal itself.
It is because of that true meditation requires silence and concentration.
40. Intelligence is the ability to perceive what is essential, what "is", and education is the process of awakening this ability in ourselves and in others.
Another phrase from this great thinker on education, another of the recurring themes in his reflections.
41. To transform the world we must start with ourselves and what is important to start with ourselves is intention.
Krishnamurti expresses through this phrase that we are our own agents of change.
42. Education is not the simple acquisition of knowledge, or collecting and correlating data, but seeing the meaning of life as a whole.
For this great thinker, it was important to give learners tools, and not just information.
43. You don't understand first and then you act. When we understand, that absolute understanding is action.
For Krishnamurti, understanding itself is already an action.
44. What matters, especially while young, is not cultivating memory but awakening a critical spirit and analysis; For only in this way can the real meaning of a fact be understood instead of rationalizing it.
Another of the phrases about education where the author reflects again on the importance of understanding and seeing something with curiosity, rather than learning.
45. True freedom is not something that can be acquired, it is the result of intelligence.
For the author, freedom is something that comes from within, that we cannot acquire and that we only achieve through self-knowledge and reflection.
46. Throughout life, from children, from school until we die, they educate us by comparing ourselves with others; however when I compare myself to another I destroy myself.
When comparing ourselves with others, we lose part of our essence and what makes us unique.
47. Freedom is essential to love; not the freedom of revolt, not the freedom to do as we please or to give in openly or secretly to our desires, but rather the freedom that comes with understanding.
Another phrase that combines two prominent themes in Krishnamurti's thought: love and freedom.
48. When there is no love in our heart, we only have one thing left: pleasure; and that pleasure is sex, therefore this becomes a huge problem.
With this phrase, the author reflects on sex as a simple substitute for the lack of love.
49. If you observe, you will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.
The body also reflects our intelligence, and it does it sometimes to warn us of the deficiencies or needs of the mind.
50. The search becomes another escape from who we really are.
The existential search takes us away from true reflection about the present and who we are, which is what really allows us to achieve self-knowledge and truth, according to Krishnamurti.
51. Only if we listen can we learn. And listening is an act of silence; only a calm but extraordinarily active mind can learn.
Again the author tells us that for learning we must free our mind of ideas and prejudices, to make room for new ones with silence and from humility.
52. The whole cannot be understood from a single point of view, which is what governments, organized religions and authoritarian parties are trying to do.
Any situation must be approached from the different existing points of view, since it must understand all the ways of understanding the world.
53. One of the strange things about love is that whatever we can do will be right if we love. When there is love, the action is always correct, in all circumstances.
Krishnamurti's idea of unconditional love, reflected in other phrases, leads us to act for the good of the other person in any case.
54. Only the individual who is not trapped in society can fundamentally influence it.
You need to see things in perspective to be able to understand them and to be able to change them.
55. Have you ever noticed that inspiration comes when you're not looking for it? It comes when all expectation stops, when the mind and heart calm down.
Again, for Krishnamurti our effort to seek is one that often takes us away from the goal.
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