Quotes by Krishnamurti

You cannot depend upon anybody. There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you – your relationship with others and with the world – there is nothing else. When you realize this, it either brings great despair, from which comes cynicism and bitterness, or, in facing the fact that you and nobody else is responsible for the world and for yourself, for what you think, what you feel, how you act, all self-pity goes. Normally we thrive on blaming others, which is a form of self-pity.

Can you and I, then, bring about in ourselves without any outside influence, without any persuasion, without any fear of punishment – can we bring about in the very essence of our being a total revolution, a psychological mutation, so that we are no longer brutal, violent, competitive, anxious, fearful, greedy, envious and all the rest of the manifestations of our nature which have built up the rotten society in which we live our daily lives?

Without knowing yourself, not only superficially but at the very depths of your being, you have no basis for any action, you have no foundation whatsoever on which you can build a house that is stable, orderly. So it is absolutely necessary if you would really take this extraordinary journey, and that is what we are going to do: journey together into this enormous, complex problem of understanding oneself. Please see the absolute, essential necessity of it, that nobody can teach you about yourself except yourself, so you have to be the guru, the disciple yourself, the teacher yourself, and learn from yourself. What you learn from another is not true. So you have to find out for yourself what you are and to learn how to observe yourself.

It is one of the most arduous tasks to go into this. It is like taking a journey together. You know when you walk together you must be friends, you must love walking together, and that is one of the most difficult things. To learn about oneself is not to accumulate knowledge about oneself. To learn about myself I have to observe myself. If I learn about myself through the accumulation of knowledge, I don’t learn about myself.

To be free of all authority, 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. And for this a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.

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.

I do not demand your faith; I am not setting myself up as an authority. I have nothing to teach you – no new philosophy, no new system, no new path to reality; there is no path to reality any more than to truth. All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable or necessary.

What is the root of obedience which breeds authority? When one is in disorder, confusion, society becomes utterly chaotic; then that very disorder creates authority, as has happened so often historically. Is the root of accepting authority fear, being in oneself uncertain, without clarity? Then each human being hopes to bring about the authority that will tell us what to do, as has happened in all religions, all sects and communities: the everlasting problem of the guru and the disciple, each destroying the other. The follower then becomes the leader. This cycle is forever repeating itself.