“If you do not compare yourself with another you will be what you are. Through comparison you hope to evolve, to grow, to become more intelligent, more beautiful. But will you? The fact is what you are, and by comparing you are fragmenting the fact which is a waste of energy. To see what you actually are without any comparison gives you tremendous energy to look. When you can look at yourself without comparison you are beyond comparison, which does not mean that the mind is stagnant with contentment.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 64)
“We are always comparing what we are with what we should be. The should-be is a projection of what we think we ought to be. Contradiction exists when there is comparison, not only with something or somebody, but with what you were yesterday, and hence there is conflict between what has been and what is. There is what is only when there is no comparison at all, and to live with what is, is to be peaceful. Then you can give your whole attention without any distraction to what is within yourself—whether it be despair, ugliness, brutality, fear, anxiety, loneliness—and live with it completely; then there is no contradiction and hence no conflict.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 63)
“Learn to be alone, but never get too attached to your aloneness. Remain capable of relating with others. Learn to meditate, but don’t move so far to an extreme that you become incapable of love. Be silent, peaceful, still, but don’t get obsessed by this stillness, or you will not be able to face the marketplace. It is easy to be silent when you are alone. It is difficult to be silent when you are with people, but that difficulty has to be faced. Once you are able to be silent with people, you have attained; now nothing can destroy it.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 163)
“One must become poor inwardly for then there is no seeking, no asking, no desire, no—nothing! It is only this inward poverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all. Such a life is a benediction not to be found in any church or any temple.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 60)
“To learn, to discover something fundamental you must have the capacity to go deeply. If you have a blunt instrument, a dull instrument, you cannot go deeply. So what we are doing is sharpening the instrument, which is the mind—the mind which has been made dull by all this justifying and condemning. You can penetrate deeply only if your mind is as sharp as a needle and as strong as a diamond.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 54)
“You cannot manage love and control it. Controlled, it is dead. Love can be controlled only when you have already killed it. If it is alive, it controls you, not otherwise. If it is alive, it possesses you. You are simply lost in it, because it is bigger than you, vaster than you, more primal than you, more foundational than you.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 162)
“One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 44)
“If you can look at [all things] without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 37)
“Have you ever noticed that when you respond to something totally, with all your heart, there is very little memory? It is only when you do not respond to a challenge with your whole being that there is a conflict, a struggle, and this brings confusion and pleasure or pain.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 36)
“If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion. Comparison in any form leads only to greater illusion and greater misery.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 32)
“Careful what you wish for. Because wishes don’t always come true, but wishing takes a lot of time and energy and focus. What you wish for determines how you’re spending a juicy part of your day. If you wish for something you can’t control, that might fill you with frustration or distract you from wishing that could lead to productive work. Better to wish for something where the wishing itself is a useful act, one that shifts your attitude and focus.”
Seth Godin
“In order to understand ourselves we need a great deal of humility. If you start by saying, ‘I know myself’, you have already stopped learning about yourself; or if you say, ‘There is nothing much to learn about myself because I am just a bundle of memories, ideas, experiences and traditions’, then you have also stopped learning about yourself. The moment you have achieved anything you cease to have that quality of innocence and humility; the moment you have a conclusion or start examining from knowledge, you are finished, for then you are translating every living thing in terms of the old. Whereas if you have no foothold, if there is no certainty, no achievement, there is freedom to look, to achieve. And when you look with freedom it is always new. A confident man is a dead human being.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 24)
“Where do we begin to understand ourselves? Here am I, and how am I to study myself, observe myself, see what is actually taking place inside myself? I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship. It is no use sitting in a corner meditating about myself. I cannot exist by myself. I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 22)
“If you say that you would like a certain man to be your lover, then in many dreams and in many fantasies you have already loved that man. And if it happens, then the real man is going to fall short of your fantasy; he is going to be just a carbon copy, because reality is never as fantastic as fantasy. Then you will be frustrated. But if you start liking that which is happening—if you don’t put your own will against the whole, if you simply say okay—whatever happens, you simply say yes—then you can never be miserable. Because no matter what happens, you are always in a positive attitude, ready to receive it and enjoy it.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 157)
“I do not demand your faith; I am not setting myself up as an authority. I have nothing to teach you—no new philosophy, no new system, no new path to reality; there is no path to reality any more than to truth. All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 21)
“To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting. When we look at ourselves with the dead authority of yesterday we will fail to understand the living movement and the beauty and quality of that movement.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 19)
“A man who says, ‘I want to change, tell me how to’, seems very earnest, very serious, but he is not. He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring about order in himself. But can authority ever bring about inward order? Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 17)
“In trying to conform to [an] ideology, you suppress yourself—whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are. If you try to study yourself according to another you will always remain a secondhand human being.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 17)