U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007), an Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher, diverged from traditional spiritual paths, rejecting enlightenment, gurus, and rituals. Following a transformative experience at 49, he claimed to exist in a natural state, free from psychological burdens. Unlike conventional spiritual leaders, he eschewed doctrines and encouraged individuals to question beliefs. Critiquing organized religions and the concept of self, U.G. Krishnamurti’s teachings were controversial yet drew followers who embraced his unconventional perspectives. Despite not achieving widespread recognition, his impact on those resonating with his radical philosophy remains significant. He passed away on March 22, 2007, in Vallecrosia, Italy.
U.G. Krishnamurti Quotes
1. “Don’t follow me, I’m lost.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
2. “You think when you don’t want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don’t think!”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
3. “Food, clothing and shelter – these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
4. “The fact is that we don’t want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
5. “All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
6. “You love fear. The ending of fear is death, and you don’t want that to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
7. “Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
8. “There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
9. “The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
10. “Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
11. “There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your ‘logically’ ascertained premise, which you call truth.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
12. “You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
13. “The body is not interested in anything you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
14. “To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a “Natural Man”.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
15. “There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
16. “There is no need to change this world at all; and there is no need to change yourself either.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
17. “Nature is interested in only two things – to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
18. “If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
19. “All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, and gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
20. “If anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phony he is; the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
21. “We don’t want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
22. “Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is you. There is nothing there inside you other than that.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
23. “It would be more interesting to learn from children than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
24. “A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. He would ask you to walk, and he would say that if you fall, you will arise and walk.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
25. “Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. Knock off that hope and the crippling feelings of helplessness go with it.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
26. “We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
27. “Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
28. “Society or culture or whatever you might want to call it, has created us all solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its continuity and status quo.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
29. “You cannot experience the death of anybody.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
30. “Yes! is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
31. “My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
32. “Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
33. “I am simply pointing out that at the rate at which we are going the whole genetic engineering technology will end up in the hands of the political system to be used for the complete control and subjugation of man.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
34. “The questioner has to come to an end. It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
35. “Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
36. “I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
37. “There is nothing there – no soul – there is only this question about after death. The question has to die now to find the answer – your answer; not my answer – because the question is born out of the assumption, the belief, that there is something to continue after death.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
38. “Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
39. “As long as you are not at peace with yourself, it is not possible for you to be at peace with others.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
40. “I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
41. “A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
42. “Life is simply a process of stimulus and response, and stimulus and response are one unitary movement.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
43. “The fear of extinction will probably bring us together, not ‘love’ or feeling of brotherhood.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
44. “The framing of what there is by the mind is what you call beauty.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
45. “Sometimes we are so involved with our activity that we lose ourselves in it, and in that sense we are living in the moment.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
46. “The demand to be prepared for all future actions and all situations is the cause of our problems. Every situation is so different; and our attempt to be prepared for all those situations is the one that is responsible for our not being able to deal with situations as they arise.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
47. “Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
48. “Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against “sorrow” is sorrow. Since you can’t stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
49. “The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
50. “As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
51. “You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can’t say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
52. “Nature’s laws know no reward, only punishment. The reward is only that you are in harmony with nature.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
53. “I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
54. “The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purpose of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
55. “I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the ‘holy business’ have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
56. “You don’t actually know anything about that person or that thing, except what you are projecting on that object or the individual. The knowledge you have about it is the experience. It goes on and on. That’s all. What that really is, you have no way of knowing.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
57. “I tell you, when you stop doing things out of hope and the desire for continuity, all you do along with it stops. You will stay afloat.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
