Quote collection
628 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Now, is it possible not to be hurt at all? Because the consequences of being hurt are the building of a wall around oneself, withdrawing in one's relationship with others in order not to be hurt more. In that there is fear and a gradual isolation. Now, we are asking: Is it possible not only to be free of past hurts but also never to be hurt again?"
"Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment."
"Isn't the origin of conflict ego? If there is no ego there is no becoming."
"The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world's problems."
"To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education."
"Identification with the rag called the national flag is an emotional and sentimental factor and for that factor you are willing to kill another - and that is called, the love of your country, love of the neighbor . . .? One can see that where sentiment and emotion come in, love is not."
"You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself, soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy."
"Truth is something which you must see immediately — and to see something clearly you must give your heart and your mind and your whole being to it immediately."
"Teaching is not the mere imparting of information but the cultivation of an inquiring mind which will penetrate into the question of what is religion and not merely accept the established religions, churches, and rituals."
"If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said...One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quite; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate"
"We choose our leaders, political or spiritual, out of our own confusion, and so they also are confused."
"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."
"If you die to everything you know,including your family,yourmemory,everything you have felt,then death is a purification,a rejuvenating process;then death brings innocence and it is only the innocent who are passionate, not the people who believe or who want to find out what happens after death."
"Only when the mind is tranquil-through self-knowledge and not through imposed self-discipline-only then, in that tranquillity, in that silence, can reality come into being. It is only then that there can be bliss, that there can be creative action."
"From these prejudices there arises conflict, transient joys and suffering. But we are unconscious of this, unconscious that we are slaves to certain forms of tradition, to social and political environment, to false values."
"You only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics,you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention."
"We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it."
"Only when the mind is completely alone can it know what is beauty, and not in any other state."
"Relationship is action, is it not? Action has meaning only in relationship; 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. The ideology, the pattern for action, prevents action. Action based on ideology hinders the understanding of relationship between man and man."
"The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure."