“It is essential sometimes to go into retreat, to stop everything that you have been doing, to stop your experiences completely and look at them anew, not keep on repeating them like machines. You would then let fresh air into your mind. Wouldn’t you? This place must be of great beauty with trees, birds, and quietness, for beauty is truth and truth is goodness and love.” – J. Krishnamurti
Here are some quotes that provide a glimpse of the profound insights into the human condition. For an in-depth exploration of the teachings, his books and videos are the best source.
We are facing a tremendous crisis which the politicians can never solve. Nor can the scientists understand or solve the crisis, nor yet the business world, the world of money. The turning point is not in politics, in religion, in the scientific world; it is in our consciousness.
The Network of Thought, Ch. 1
All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws, and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society. As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves: can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether. It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognizes the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live, or whatever culture we happen to belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.
Freedom from the Known, Ch. 1
So now we are going to investigate ourselves together—not one person explaining while you read, agreeing or disagreeing with him as you follow the words on the page, but taking a journey together, a journey of discovery into the most secret corners of our minds. And to take such a journey we must travel light; we cannot be burdened with opinions, prejudices, and conclusions—all that old furniture we have collected for the last two thousand years and more. Forget all you know about yourself, forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.It rained last night heavily, and now the skies are beginning to clear; it is a new, fresh day. Let us meet that fresh day as if it were the only day. Let us start on our journey together with all the remembrance of yesterday left behind—and begin to understand ourselves for the first time.
