Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

I am much more interested in defending my ideas than defending my identities.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Of course I'm a fake. We're all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we're not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

Imitation has to be avoided. Understanding should be the only law, never imitation.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It's powerful because it's so rare.

I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want somebody else to be and then people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is nothing like that.

Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

The more you act the further you get away from the truth.

And now I understand that truth casts a spell of its own, one I'm not sure of how to hold on to, though I'm desperate to try.

It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.

I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

the growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humour. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third – before long the best lines cancel out – and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score.... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'

I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.

I don't know how you feel, but I feel like writing, clarity of thought, and truth have been validated because we see what happens when we get lax in those areas. I'm excited by the idea that writers like us can actually reach out and try to understand and prod and agitate the people who are in support of Trump because we have the tools to do it. We're language people and we're idea people.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.