U. G. Krishnamurti

“You think when you don't want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don't think!”

“A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. He would ask you to walk, and he would say that if you fall, you will arise and walk.”

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

“It [thought] is a mechanical thing and can solve only mechanical problems. But you want to use it to understand something living; that is the problem. It is not intended for that. Human problems are something living. You cannot use thinking to solve those problems.”

“It is the body that is immortal. It is living from moment to moment. As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.”

“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.”

“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".”

“I have assumed that the goal, enlightenment, exists. I have had to search and 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. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.”

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

“It is the ones who believe in God, who preach peace and talk of love, who have created the human jungle. Compared to man's jungle, nature's jungle is simple and sensible! In nature animals don't kill their own kind. That is part of the beauty of nature. In this regard man is worse than the other animals. The so-called "civilized" man kills for ideals and beliefs, while the animals kill only for survival.”

“Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events.”

“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.”

“If you are freed from the goal of the "perfect" ,"godly", "truly religious" then that which is natural in man begins to express itself. Your religious and secular culture has placed before you the ideal man or woman, the perfect human being, and then tries to fit everybody into that mold. It is impossible. Nature does not exist at all. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To be an individual and to be yourself you don't have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy — the will, the effort — we waste trying to become that! If that energy is released, what is it that we can't do? How simple it would be for every one of us to live in this world!”

“You know the story of 'Alice in Wonderland'. The red queen has to run faster and faster to keep still where she is. That is exactly what you are all doing. running faster and faster. But you are not moving anywhere.”

“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. You cannot free yourself of that burden by trying to develop that courage. If you are freed from the entire burden of the entire past of mankind, then what is left there is the courage.”

“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.”

“Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing. Whether one is here in India or Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one without the other. But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interest of the survival of this living organism.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We think that thoughts are there inside of us. We think that they are self-generated and spontaneous. What is actually there is what I call a thought-sphere. The thought-sphere is the totality of man's experiences, thoughts, and feelings passed on to us from generation to generation.”

“Thought creates frontiers everywhere. That's all it can do. ...it is thought that has created the world; and you draw lines on this planet, "This is my country, that is your country". So how can there be unity between two countries? The very thing that is creating the frontiers and differences cannot be the means to bridge the different viewpoints. It is an exercise in futility.”

“Political institutions and ideologies are the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of the man; in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind. We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs, and we torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something. All our experience, spiritual or otherwise, is the basic cause of our suffering... The body is not interested in anything "you" are interested in; that is the battle that is going on all the time.”

“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. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man.”

“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.”