40 Best J. Krishnamurti Quotes From The Book "Freedom From The Known"

J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

Jiddu Krishnamurti born on 11 May 1895, in Madanapalle, India was one of the great philosophers and a cult figure in the world of religions. He was a voracious thinker, a peculiar observer, a spiritual leader, and also a writer, who wrote several books based on his findings.

Before checking out J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known” quickly read the short biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

About J. Krishnamurti (11 May 1895 to 17 Feb 1986):

J. Krishnamurti was educated in theosophy by British social reformer Annie Besant. She announced that Krishnamurti is the coming “World Teacher” and a messianic figure, who would bring enlightenment to the world.

When Krishnamurti was only a teenager, he broke into the aristocratic societies of London, and made his presence felt in the Theosophy Society of London.

Under the mentorship of Annie Besant, Krishnaji travelled around the world to give lectures on various subjects pertaining to—- spirituality, freedom, nature of mind, human relationships, and conditioning.

Though dissatisfied with being the representative of the Theosophical society, at age 34 Krishnamurti renounced his title of the “World Teacher” in 1929 during one of his lecturers.

He addressed the audience with a shocking revelation that — he is not the World Teacher, and was trying to break away from the cult figure, that he was shaped up to be.

Krishnamurti enunciated, “You must become liberated not because of me but in spite of me. All this life and especially during the last few months I have struggled to be free-free of my friends, my books, my associations. You must struggle for the same freedom.”

Krishnamurti’s Aim and Purpose in Life:

Krishnaji lived by his statement that he gave in his breakthrough speech in 1929 , where he said that “truth is a pathless land.”

He said, you must strive for absolute spiritual freedom even from teachers. Since he believed that nobody can bring a universal change in humans, and it is an individual’s duty to strive for physical, emotional, and psychological revolution.

Krishnamurti strongly believed, that self-awareness is the only thing that can bring psychological revolution, and such revolution cannot be brought by any external entity, be it religious, political or social.

Throughout his life, K participated in debates, and held discourses on the nature of mind, meditation, inquiry, human conditioning, and relationships. Since he believed one needs to have a clear thought process, and understanding of what is going inside them in order to bring a radical change in the society.

In 1929 when J. Krishnamurti parted ways with theosophical society, he said,

“Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.“

Let’s read and analyse what Krishnamurti wanted to convey his entire life, and thank him for being a great service to mankind. K will always be remembered for his great work, now let’s dive into the content to absorb his wise words.

Here are the best J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Know.” I hope you learn something from it because a mind that learns never gets old.

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J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

1. “Do observe what is actually taking place within yourself and outside yourself in the competitive culture in which you live with its desire for power, position, prestige, name, success and all the rest of it – observe the achievements of which you are so proud, this whole field you call living in which there is conflict in every form of relationship, breeding hatred, antagonism, brutality and endless wars.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

2. “It is important to understand from the very beginning that I am not formulating any philosophy or any theological structure of ideas or theological concepts. It seems to me that all ideologies are utterly idiotic. What is important is not a philosophy of life but to observe what is actually taking place in our daily life, inwardly and outwardly.”

3. “Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don’t know where it will take you.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known“

4. “A man who says, ‘I want to change, tell me how to’, seems very earnest, very serious, but he is not. He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring about order in himself. But can authority ever bring about inward order? Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.

You may see the truth of this intellectually but can you actually apply it so that your mind no longer projects any authority, the authority of a book, a teacher, a wife or husband, a parent, a friend or of society? Because we have always functioned within the pattern of a formula, the formula becomes the ideology and the authority; but the moment you really see that the question, ‘How can I change?‘ sets up a new authority, you have finished with authority for ever.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

5. “To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and
observes.”

6. “When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves. Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

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7. ‘We are disturbed about life, politics, the economic situation, the horror, the brutality, the sorrow in the world as well as in ourselves, and from that we realize how terribly narrowly conditioned we are. And what shall we do? Accept that disturbance and live with it as most of us do? Get used to it as one gets used to living with a backache? Put up with it?”

8. “You can face a fact only in the present and if you never allow it to be present because you are always escaping from it, you can never face it, and because we have cultivated a hole network of escapes we are caught in the habit of escape.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

9. “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.”

10. “We live in fragments. You are one thing at the office, another at home; you talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving your neighbours, yet kill him with competition; there is one part of you working, looking, independently of the other.

Are you aware of this fragmentary existence in yourself? And is it possible for a brain that has broken up its own functioning, its own thinking, into fragments – is it possible for such a brain to be aware of the whole field? Is it possible to look at the whole of consciousness completely, totally, which means to be a total human being?” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

11. “That is what we do. We carry our burdens all the time; we never die to them, we never leave them behind. ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

12. “To understand pleasure is not to deny it. We are not condemning it or saying it is right or wrong, but if we pursue it, let us do so with our eyes open, knowing that a mind that is all the time seeking pleasure must inevitably find its shadow, pain. They cannot be separated, although we run after pleasure and try to avoid pain.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

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13. “Have you ever noticed that when you respond to something totally, with all your heart, there is very little memory? It is only when you do not respond to a challenge with your whole being that there is a conflict, a struggle, and this brings confusion and pleasure or pain.

And the struggle breeds memory. That memory is added to all the time by other memories and it is those memories which respond. Anything that is the result of memory is old and therefore never free. There is no such thing as freedom of thought. It is sheer nonsense.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

14. “Do you know what time is? Not by the watch, not chronological time, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes

15. “Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy. Until we are free from fear, climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, we will always remain in darkness.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

16. “One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

17. “FEAR, PLEASURE, SORROW, thought and violence are all interrelated. Most of us take pleasure in violence, in disliking somebody, hating a particular race or group of people, having antagonistic feelings towards others. But in a state of mind in which all violence has come to an end there is a joy which is very different from the pleasure of violence with its conflicts, hatreds and fears.”

18. “Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.”

19. “It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes

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20. “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

21. “If you want to understand the actual you must give your whole attention, all your energy, to it. That attention and energy are distracted when you create a fictitious, ideal world. So can you completely banish the ideal? The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, what love is, has no concept at all. He lives only in what is.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

22. “Are we ever alone? Or are we carrying with us all the burdens of yesterday?” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes

23. “Poverty becomes a marvellously beautiful thing when the mind is free of society. One must become poor inwardly for then there is no seeking, no asking, no desire, no – nothing! It is only this inward poverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all. Such a life is a benediction not to be found in any church or any temple.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

24. “If you put the question to yourself, `How am I to be free from conflict?’, you are creating another problem and hence you are increasing conflict, whereas if you just see it as a fact – see it as you would see some concrete object – clearly, directly – then you will understand essentially the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

25. “The youth of today, like all youth, are in revolt against society, and that is a good thing in itself, but revolt is not freedom because when you revolt it is a reaction and that reaction sets up its own pattern and you get caught in that pattern. You think it is something new. it is not; it is the old in a different mould. Any social or political revolt will inevitably revert to the good old bourgeois mentality.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

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26. “We think that changes in ourselves can come about in time, that order in ourselves can be built up little by little, added to day by day. But time doesn’t bring order or peace, so we must stop thinking in terms of gradualness. This means that there is no tomorrow for us to be peaceful in. We have to be orderly on the instant.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

27. “Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use those words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it? In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which the human being is caught is destroying him. So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don’t love what you are doing. When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes

28. “When I say, Love has no tomorrow and no yesterday’, or, When there is no centre then there is love’, it has reality for me but not for you. You may quote it and make it into a formula but that has no validity. You have to see it for yourself, but to do so there must be freedom to look, freedom from all condemnation, all judgement all agreeing or disagreeing.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

29. “That is the first thing to learn – not to seek. When you seek you are really only window-shopping.”

30. “There is a story of a religious teacher who used to talk every morning to his disciples. One morning he got on to the platform and was just about to begin when a little bird came and sat on the window sill and began to sing, and sang away with full heart. Then it stopped and flew away and the teacher said, `The sermon for this morning is over’.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

31. “Beauty lies in the total abandonment of the observer and the observed and there can be self-abandonment only when there is total austerity – not the austerity of the priest with its harshness, its sanctions, rules and obedience – not austerity in clothes, ideas, food and behaviour – but the austerity of being totally simple which is complete humility. Then there is no achieving, no ladder to climb; there is only the first step and the first step is the everlasting step.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

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32. “Two people who have lived together for a long time have an image of each other which prevents them from really being in relationship. If we understand relationship we can co-operate but co-operation cannot possibly exist through images, through symbols, through ideological conceptions.

Only when we understand the true relationship between each other is there a possibility of love, and love is denied when we have images. Therefore it is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbour, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods – you have nothing but images.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

33. “Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.”

34. “Ideas have become far more important to us than action – ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

35. “It is really extraordinarily interesting to watch the operation of one’s own thinking, just to observe how one thinks, where that reaction we call thinking, springs from. Obviously from memory. Is there a beginning to thought at all? If there is, can we find out its beginning – that is, the beginning of memory, because if we had no memory we would have no thought?” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

36. “The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.”

37. “To have inward solitude and space is very important because it implies freedom to be, to go, to function, to fly. After all, goodness can only flower in space just as virtue can flower only when there is freedom. We may have political freedom but inwardly we are not free and therefore there is no space.

No virtue, no quality that is worth while, can function or grow without this vast space within oneself. And space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

38. “Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.”

39. “Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration. It is one of the favourite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration – that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts. This is a most stupid, ugly thing, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to.

It means that all the time you are having a battle between the insistence that you must concentrate on the one hand and your mind on the other which wanders away to all sorts of other things, whereas you should be attentive to every movement of the mind wherever it wanders. When your mind wanders off it means you are interested in something else.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

40. “Space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.”

41. “We are all engaged in the pursuit of pleasure in some form or other – intellectual, sensuous or cultural pleasure, the pleasure of reforming, telling others what to do, of modifying the evils of society, of doing good – the pleasure of greater knowledge, greater physical satisfaction, greater experience, greater understanding of life, all the clever, cunning things of the mind – and the ultimate pleasure is, of course, to have God.”

42. “Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known

43. “Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes

44. “Thought in human relationships is always demanding pleasure which it covers by different words like loyalty, helping, giving, sustaining, serving.” ~ J. Krishnamurti Quotes from the Book “Freedom From The Known”

45. “The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself. Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.”

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