"...we know how the religious teachers and others have said that we should be desireless, cultivate detachment, be free from desire - which is really absurd, because desire has to be understood, not destroyed. If you destroy desire, you may destroy life itself. If you pervert desire, shape it, control it, dominate it, suppress it, you may be destroying something extraordinarily beautiful."

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Vol.12 p.244


"It is the same with sexual desire or any other form of desire. There is nothing wrong with desire. To react is per­fectly normal. If you stick a pin in me I shall react unless I am paralyzed. But then thought steps in and chews over the delight and turns into pleasure. Thought wants to repeat the experience, and the more you repeat the more mechanical it becomes; the more you think about it, the more strength thought gives to pleasure.

So thought creates and sustains pleasure through desire, and gives it continuity, and therefore the natural reaction of desire to any beautiful thing is perverted by thought. Thought turns it into a memory and memory is then nourished by thinking about it over and over again.

Of course, memory has a place at a certain level. In everyday life we could not function at all without it. In its own field it must be efficient but there is a state of mind where it has very little place. A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom."

Freedom From the Known, p.36


"...why not look at life not as one permanent desire but as a series of fleeting desires always in opposition to each other? Hence the mind need not be in a state of contradiction. If I regard life not as a permanent desire but as a series of temporary desires which are constantly changing, then there is no contradiction."

The First and Last Freedom, p.72