Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

Acting for me is finding those things that, finding the strings of humanity that tie us all together. And you only find that by living life and loving and breaking up.

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

I do know middle age can bring greater depth, greater wisdom, greater capacity for love, greater capacity for relationship, greater consciousness and desire to serve and awareness of the fate of mankind - all these wonderful things, yes. And I know I'm getting there.

They say: 'If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind.' I say: 'If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself.

One of the things that is devastating is I realise I haven't been living a different life than when I was, like, 12. I'm shocked at how reclusive I've been since then. I was unaware of it until recently.

I have a tendency to go through my life at full speed and as a one-man band, and so I don't generally stop and take in other people enough to develop many relationships. I'm starting to regret that a bit. I want to change it.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.

In terms of sexual orientation I don't really feel I've changed. I don't feel there was a hidden part of my sexuality that I wasn't aware of. I'd been with men all my life, and I'd never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn't seem so strange.

We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.

Sometimes, we only get to know someone as one aspect of who they are. Then you start peeling back the layers and understanding more and more about who they are - their vulnerabilities, their fears, their joys, all those other words that equal humanity.

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

I was quite a different child, I felt isolated. In time, that level of being with yourself crystallises who you are, and you can see what other people are without being blinded by what they want from you.

If you can get to know a person, and you can really understand them, it can usually help you better understand yourself and why you believe what you believe.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

If you are never alone you cannot know yourself. And if you do not know yourself, you will begin to fear the void.

I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identifiction, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life.

I wasn't really testing it on myself as much as I was learning from other people about what it meant to live and love with your whole heart, and then thinking, oh my god, I'm not doing that.

If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123]

The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world.

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.