Quotes from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Teaching is not the mere imparting of knowledge but the cultivation of an inquiring mind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“One has to know what it is to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learned.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“It is only when the mind, which has taken shelter behind the walls of self-protection, frees itself from its own creations that there can be that exquisite reality. After all, these walls of self-protection are the creations of the mind which, conscious of its insufficiency, builds these walls of protection, and behind them takes shelter. One has built up these barriers unconsciously or consciously, and one’s mind is so crippled, bound, held, that action brings greater conflict, further disturbances. So the mere search for the solution of your problems is not going to free the mind from creating further problems. As long as this center of self-protectiveness, born of insufficiency, exists, there must be disturbances, tremendous sorrow, and pain; and you cannot free the mind of sorrow by disciplining it not to be insufficient. That is, you cannot discipline yourself, or be influenced by conditions and environment, in order not to be shallow. You say to yourself, “I am shallow; I recognize the fact, and how am I going to get rid of it?” I say, do not seek to get rid of it, which is merely a process of substitution, but become conscious, become aware of what is causing this insufficiency. You cannot compel it; you cannot force it; it cannot be influenced by an ideal, by a fear, by the pursuit of enjoyment and powers. You can find out the cause of insufficiency only through awareness. That is, by looking into environment and piercing into its significance there will be revealed the cunning subtleties of self-protection. After all, self-protection is the result of insufficiency, and as the mind has been trained, caught up in its bondage for centuries, you cannot discipline it, you cannot overcome it. If you do, you lose the significance of the deceits and subtleties of thought and emotion behind which mind has taken shelter; and to discover these subtleties you must become conscious, aware. Now to be aware is not to alter. Our mind is accustomed to alteration which is merely modification, adjustment, becoming disciplined to a condition; whereas if you are aware, you will discover the full significance of the environment. Therefore there is no modification, but entire freedom from that environment. Only when all these walls of protection are destroyed in the flame of awareness, in which there is no modification or alteration or adjustment, but complete understanding of the significance of environment with all its delicacies and subtleties—only through that understanding is there the eternal; because in that there is no “you” functioning as a self-protective focus. But as long as that self-protecting focus which you call the “I” exists, there must be confusion, there must be disturbance, disharmony, and conflict. You cannot destroy these hindrances by disciplining yourself or by following a system or by imitating a pattern; you can understand them with all their complications only through the full awareness of mind and heart. Then there is an ecstasy, there is that living movement of truth, which is not an end, not a culmination, but an ever-creative living, an ecstasy which cannot be described, because all description must destroy it. So long as you are not vulnerable to truth, there is no ecstasy, there is no immortality.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“To respond to any challenge according to one’s conditioning is merely to expand the prison, or to decorate its bars.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“To know the mind, must you not be aware of its activities? The mind is only experience, not just the immediate, but also the accumulated. The mind is the past in response to the present, which makes for the future. The total process of the mind has to be understood.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Teaching is the noblest profession—if it can be called a profession at all. It is an art that requires, not just intellectual attainments, but infinite patience and love.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“With most of us, the difficulty is that we are unaware of our escapes. We are so conditioned, so accustomed to our escapes, that we take them as realities. But if we will look more deeply into ourselves, we will see how extraordinarily lonely, how extraordinarily empty, we are under the superficial covering of our escapes.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Truth is in everyone; it is not far, it is not near; it is eternally there.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Have you ever tried living with yourself? If so, you will begin to see that your self is not a static state, it is a fresh living thing. And to live with a living thing your mind must also be alive. And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgments, and values.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“We see throughout the world extremes of poverty and riches, abundance and at the same time starvation; we have class distinction and racial hatred, the stupidity of nationalism and the appalling cruelty of war. There is exploitation of man by man; religions with their vested interests have become the means of exploitation, also dividing man from man. There is anxiety, confusion, hopelessness, frustration. We see all this. It is part of our daily life. Caught up in the wheel of suffering, if you are at all thoughtful you must have asked yourself how these human problems can be solved. Either you are conscious of the chaotic state of the world, or you are completely asleep, living in a fantastic world, in an illusion. If you are aware, you must be grappling with these problems. In trying to solve them, some turn to experts for their solution, and follow their ideas and theories. Gradually they form themselves into an exclusive body, and thus they come into conflict with other experts and their parties; and the individual merely becomes a tool in the hands of the group or of the expert. Or you try to solve these problems by following a particular system, which, if you carefully examine it, becomes merely another means of exploiting the individual. Or you think that to change all this cruelty and horror there must be a mass movement, a collective action. Now the idea of a mass movement becomes merely a catchword if you, the individual, who are part of the mass, do not understand your true function. True collective action can take place only when you, the individual, who are also the mass, are awake and take the full responsibility for your action without compulsion. Please bear in mind that I am not giving you a system of philosophy which you can follow blindly, but I am trying to awaken the desire for true and intelligent fulfillment, which alone can bring about happy order and peace in the world. There can be fundamental and lasting change in the world, there can be love and intelligent fulfillment, only when you wake up and begin to free yourself from the net of illusions, the many illusions which you have created about yourself through fear.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“You are going to be educated. I don’t know why, but you are going to be. And then what? Lead a comfortable life? Not that one is against comfort, but if one is seeking comfort in life it becomes rather shoddy, father shallow, and you have to conform to a tremendous extent to the structure of the culture in which you live. And if you revolt against the culture and join a group, which has its own pattern, you have to fit into that too.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Krishnamurti admonishes us that “Meditation is not something different from daily life … it is the seeing of what is and going beyond it.” If one has not seen what is, how can one go beyond it?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“The mind that is accumulating is frightened to die, and such a mind can never discover what is truth. But to a mind that is dying every minute to everything that it has experienced, there comes an astonishing vitality because every moment is new; and only then is the mind capable of discovery.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“What I want to do is to help you, the individual, to cross the stream of suffering, confusion and conflict, through deep and complete fulfillment. This fulfillment does not come through egotistic self-expression, nor through compulsion and imitation. Not through some fantastic sentiment and conclusions, but through clear thinking, through intelligent action, we shall cross this stream of pain and sorrow. There is a reality which can be understood only through deep and true fulfillment.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“There can be fundamental and lasting change in the world, there can be love and intelligent fulfillment, only when you wake up and begin to free yourself from the net of illusions, the many illusions which you have created about yourself through fear.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“Before you can act fully and truly, you must know the prison in which you are living, how it has been created; and in examining it without any self-defense you will find out for yourself its true significance, which no other can convey to you. Through your own awakening of intelligence, through your own suffering you will discover the manner of true fulfillment.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“To me, the true artist is one who lives completely, harmoniously, who does not divide his art from living, whose very life is that expression, whether it be a picture, music, or his behavior; who has not divorced his expression on a canvas or in music or in stone from his daily conduct, daily living. That demands the highest intelligence, highest harmony. To me the true artist is the man who has that harmony. He may express it on canvas, or he may talk, or he may paint; or he may not express it at all, he may feel it. But all this demands that exquisite poise, that intensity of awareness and, therefore, his expression is not divorced from the daily continuity of living.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“I am sure you have been brought up in the school of “must” and “must not” and hence, you have destroyed thought and feeling. You have been bound and crippled by systems, methods, by your teachers. So leave all those “musts” and “must nots.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

“if we as human beings saw the intimate connection between all these, between politics, religion, economics, and social life, if we saw the connection, then we would not think and act separately, individualistically.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

About the author

Popular quotes

“Bless them that persecute you.' If our enemy cannot put up with us any longer and takes to cursing us, our immediate reaction must be to lift up our hands and bless him. Our enemies are the blessed of the Lord. Their curse can do us no harm. May their poverty be enriched with all the riches of God, with the blessing of Him whom they seek to oppose in vain. We are ready to endure their curses so long as they redound to their blessing.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quote from The Cost of Discipleship

“What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Brief Lives

“You have to rely on whatever sparks you have inside.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Sugar Daddy

“The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard.”
― José Saramago, quote from Baltasar and Blimunda

“I'm a big boy. I can take it.
You got into a fight.
I'm also stupid.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.