It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.
You can only be afraid of what you think you know.
Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.
To ask the ‘right’ question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.
But what is the point of education at all? Is it merely to cultivate the capacity of memory, passing examinations and getting a job and all the rest, or is education something entirely different? Something more!
Sirs, if you are listening and are not acting, it is like a man who is always tilling but never sowing. It is better not to listen to a truth than to listen without acting, for then it becomes a poison.
It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.
To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting.
We need a tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear but when there is this energy which comes from throwing off every form of fear, that energy itself produces the radical inward revolution.
One is never afraid of the unknown one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.
Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear…It is not discipline first and then freedom; freedom is at the very beginning, not at the end.
space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.
You have to be a light to yourself in a world that is utterly becoming dark.
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.
The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.
To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
The word ‘innocence’ means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don’t know where it will take you.
The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.
It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
One of the fundamental causes of the disintegration of society is copying, which is the worship of authority.
We are so sluggish in our mentality that we think the world’s problems are not our business, that they have to be resolved by the United Nations or by substituting new leaders for the old.
There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation surely we cease to be creative.
Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.
When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.
Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new, and therefore it is its own eternity.
And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we really are.
What we are trying to do is to understand this confusion and not cover it up with quotations.
Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something, and it is only such love that can know freedom.
A man who knows what it is to have humility is a vain man.
The very desire to be certain,to be secure,is the beginning of bondage.It’s only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty,and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.
It is only in virtue that you can discover, that you can live – not in the cultivation of a virtue, which merely brings about respectability, not understanding and freedom.
Religion is the sense of comprehension of the totality of existence.
If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos – not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos – not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
You are this, which does not satisfy, so you want to be that. If there were an understanding of this, would that come into being? Because you do not understand this, you create that, hoping through that to understand or to escape from this.
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
If we can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it because the answer is not separate from the problem.
Discipline does not mean suppression and control nor is it adjustment to a pattern or ideology. It means a mind that sees ‘what is’ and learns from ‘what was’.
If your eyes are blinded with your worries you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.
If I follow a particular method of knowing myself, then I shall have the result which that system necessitates; but the result will obviously not be the understanding of myself.
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.
If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.
Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.
A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.
No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.
Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.
For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.
To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.