Best 5 quotes of J. Krishnamurti on MyQuotes

Conflict is the essence of the self.

There are those who don’t believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe at all in anything, though this doesn’t deny the extraordinary mystery of life. But belief is a word, a thought, and this is not the thing, anymore than your name is actually you. Through experience you hope to touch the truth of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions your experience. It isn’t that the experience comes to prove the belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else.

Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.

We are asking if thought can be aware of itself. That is rather a complex question, and requires very careful observation. Thought has created wars through nationalism, through sectarian religions. Thought has created all this; God has not created the hierarchy of the church--the pope, all the robes, all the rituals, the swinging of the incense, the candles. All that paraphernalia that goes on in a cathedral or in a church is put together by thought, copied, some of it, from the ancient Egyptians, from the ancient Hindus, and Hebrews. It is all thought. So "God" is created by thought.

Wisdom is not in a book, it has no secret source. You will find the real very near; it is in yourself. But to discover it there must be the activity of constant alertness. When thought is passively aware, watching and following, then the map of self-knowledge unfolds itself. Self-knowledge is not by the study of the self in isolation, for there is no isolation. To live is to be related, and isolation is merely escape. If thought is alertly passive, watching its own movements and flutters, then when sleep comes the conscious mind is capable of receiving the hints and intimations of the hidden consciousness. He who desires to discover the real, the eternal, must put aside every book, every system, every guru, for that which is can be uncovered only through self-knowledge. From: Fifth Talk in Madras