“What is important is not a philosophy of life but to observe what is actually taking place in our daily life, inwardly and outwardly.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 16)
“We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us. And only when we realise, not intellectually but actually, as actually as we would recognise that we are hungry or in pain, that you and I are responsible for all this existing chaos, for all the misery throughout the entire world because we have contributed to it in our daily lives and are part of this monstrous society with its wars, divisions, its ugliness, brutality and greed—only then will we act.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 14)
“The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself. Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 12)
“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, ‘Tell me all about it—what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 10)
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Adults whose childhood were focused mainly on happiness, are not only unprepared for tough moments, they experience more discomfort in those tough moments because deep down, they think they’re doing something wrong if they can’t ‘find the happy’ and get themselves to a ‘better place.’”
Dr. Becky Kennedy
“It can be very difficult to have one’s own space. But unless you have your own space, you will never become acquainted with your own being. You will never come to know who you are. Always engaged, always occupied in a thousand and one things—in relationships, in worldly affairs, anxieties, plans, future, past—one continuously lives on the surface. If you love yourself deeply and go down into yourself, you will be ready to love others even more deeply, because one who does not know oneself cannot love very deeply.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 153)
“When you have a dream that seems to be significant—maybe violent, nightmarish, but you feel that there is some import in it—in the morning, or even in the middle of the night, before you forget the dream, sit in your bed and close your eyes. Befriend the dream; just tell it, ‘I am with you, and I am ready to come to you. Lead me wherever you want to lead me; I am available.’ Just surrender to the dream. Close your eyes and move with it, enjoy it; let the dream unfold. You will be surprised at what treasures a dream is hiding, and you will see that it keeps on unfolding.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 152)
“The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 224)
“The most important things, each man must do for himself.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 224)
“All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 223)
“If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 223)
“The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 223)
“For a long while now I have trusted my dreaming self as wiser than that waking self whose head is cluttered with reason and practicalities, so by trying to control things that he sometimes forgets that the heart has reasons that reason does not know. When I dream, I never forget to trust myself.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 216)
“Along the way, like everyone else, I must bear my burdens. But I do not intend to bear them graciously, nor in silence. I will take my sadness and as I can I will make it sing. In this way when others hear my song, they may resonate and respond out of the depths of their own feelings.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 214)
“My pilgrimage of repeated return to the sea will not end so long as I live. And now I know that I shall live, for as long as is given to me. And should my body be battered even more, then I will live as I can, enjoying what I might, having what joy is available to me, and being what I may to the people whom I love. I must continue my pilgrimage, for it is my only way of remaining open to this vision. It is to this end that I must struggle for the remainder of that pilgrimage that is my life.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 214)
“One of the reasons I stopped getting high was that that colorful fog came to seem like the only reality. Living in between highs was too often an empty drag. Many of my fellow hipsters began to bridge the gap with heroin. Some of them are now dead junkies, overdosed with illusion. I never tried heroin myself, because instinctively I knew that I would have liked it so much that in an instant I would have become the hippest of junkies, lost to myself forever. Since that time, chemically induced pilgrimages have seemed to me to be misleading detours. The way must not be sought by putting ecstasy into my body, but by finding it within my Self. Drugs can give pleasure and being high can be fund but the essence of pilgrimage cannot be found in a vial.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 203)
“Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free. Condemned to this freedom, it is difficult for a man to face the fact that he feels like a misfit in this life, difficult until he discovers the secret that ‘all men, finally, are misfits.’ There seems to be no way out of it.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 196)
“[A man] stands somewhere between absolute freedom on the one hand, and total helplessness on the other. All of his important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. It is enough if a man accepts his freedom, takes his best shot, does what he can, faces the consequences of his acts, and makes no excuses. It may not be fair that a man gets to have total responsibility for his own life without total control over it, but it seems to me that for good or for bad, that’s just the way it is.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 194)