Quotes by Krishnamurti

Have you ever looked at a tree without a single word of like or dislike, without a single image? What then takes place? Then, for the first time, you see the tree as it is and you see the beauty of it, the colour, the depth, the vitality of it. A tree, or even another person, is fairly easy to observe; but to observe oneself that way – that is to observe without the observer – is much more difficult. So one must find out who is the observer.

Beauty is never time-binding; it is wholly free of time and so of culture. It is there when the self is not. The self is put together by time, by the movement of thought, by the known, by the word. In the abandonment of the self, in that total attention, that essence of beauty is there. The letting go of the self is not the calculated action of desire-will. Will is directive and so resistant, divisive, and so breeds conflict. The dissolution of the self is not the evolution of the knowledge of the self; time as a factor does not enter into it at all. There is no way or means to end it. The total inward non-action is the positive attention of beauty.

What is beauty? The great architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, the great temples and the mosques of the world, constructed by great architects, the great painters, the great sculptors – Michelangelo – ah! When you see all that, that’s beautiful. So is beauty manmade? Please exercise your brains to find out. A tiger is not manmade, thank the lord! A tree in a field alone, solitary, with all the dignity of a marvellous old tree – that is not manmade. But the moment you paint that tree it’s manmade, and you admire, go to a museum to see that tree painted by a great artist. So in our life, part of the art of living is to understand the depth and beauty of freedom, and the goodness of it. And what is beauty? Not the picture, the poem, the marvellous writer – but what is beauty? A beautiful man, a beautiful woman, a face that has depth. And without that aesthetic quality in life, which is born of sensitivity, which is born out of all the senses in action, not one or two or three senses, but the whole movement of the senses. Surely beauty is when the self is not. When I am not, beauty is. When the self is not, love is. And so love, freedom, goodness, beauty, are one, not separate, not something pursued. One pursues beauty and spends the rest of one’s life on that. But they are all interrelated. Goodness, that word, though it is very old fashioned, has an extraordinary depth. To feel the depth of goodness. And that can only be when there is freedom, when there is love and beauty.

There must be order. And that is part of meditation. Order means beauty and there is so little beauty in our life. Beauty is not man made; it is not in the picture, however modern, however ancient it is; it is not in the building, in the statue, nor in the cloud, the leaf or on the water. Beauty is where there is order – a mind that is utterly unconfused, that is absolutely orderly. And there can be order only when there is total self-denial, when the ‘me’ has no importance whatsoever. The ending of the ‘me’ is part of meditation. That is the major, the only meditation.

It is absolutely necessary for maturity that there should be:
1. Complete simplicity which goes with humility, not in things or possessions but in the quality of being.
2. Passion with that intensity which is not merely physical.
3. Beauty; not only the sensitivity to outward reality but being sensitive to that beauty which is beyond and above thought and feeling.
4. Love; the totality of it, not the thing that knows jealousy, attachment, dependence; not that as divided into carnal and divine. The whole immensity of it.
5. And the mind that can pursue, that can penetrate without motive, without purpose, into its own immeasurable depths; that has no barrier, that is free to wander without time-space.