"...when...you will understand what living is...Then there is no fear of life, of the movement of life."

The Awakening of Intelligence, "Freedom"


"It was there, the very essence of death. The essence of self is death but this death was the very essence of life as well. In fact they were not separate, life and death. This was not something conjured up by the brain for its comfort and ideational security. The very living was the dying and dying was living. In that car, with all that beauty and colour, with that 'feeling' of ecstasy, death was part of love, part of everything. Death wasn’t a symbol, an idea, a thing that one knew. It was there, in reality, in fact, as intense and demanding as the honk of a car that wanted to pass. As life would never leave nor can be put aside, so death now would never leave or be put aside. It was there with an extraordinary intensity and with a finality."

Krishnamurti’s Notebook, p.66


"It was a bright, fresh morning and the flowers were splendid in their summer colours. Beyond the huge, tall open Eiffel Tower, the main attraction, passed a funeral procession, the coffin and the hearse covered with flowers, followed by many cars.

Even in death, we want to be important, to our vanity and pretence there is no end. Everyone wants to be somebody or be associated with someone who is somebody...Without recognition they have no meaning...power is always respected and so is made respectable. Power is always evil, wielded by the politician or by the saint or by the wife over the husband. However evil it is, everyone craves for it, and those who have it want more of it.

And the hearse with those gay flowers in the sun seems so far away and even death does not end power for it continues in another. It's the torch of evil that continues from generation to generation...Children were calling and playing as the hearse passed by, never even looking at it, absorbed in their game and laughter."

Krishnamurti's Notebook, p.91-92


"Does life having meaning, a purpose? Is not living in itself its own purpose? Why do we want more?...Our difficulty is that, since our life is empty, we want to find a purpose to life and strive for it. Such a purpose of life can only be mere intellection, without any reality; when the purpose of life is pursued by a stupid, dull mind, by an empty heart, that purpose will also be empty. This question about the purpose of life is put by those who do not love."

The First and Last Freedom, 1954


"We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time. But we have never questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all.

We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants and to the conclusions of psychical research, but we never ask, never, how to live--to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty every day.

We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully avoided. But death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox.

To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is."

Freedom From The Known, p.76-77


"What does it mean to die? To give up everything. Death cuts you off with a very, very sharp razor from your attachments, from your Gods, superstitions, from your desire for comfort and so on...It means to be totally free, to be totally unattached to everything that man has put together, or what you have put together - totally free. No attachments, no Gods, no future, no past. You don't see the beauty of it, the greatness of it, the extraordinary strength of it, while living to be dying...?"

Unknown source


"The man who looks for a simple answer to life has obviously a dull mind, a stupid mind. Life has no conclusion, life has no definite pattern; life is living, altering, changing..."

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Vol.5 p.144


"You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and the mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is."

Unknown source


"Death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live."

Unknown source


"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."

Think on These Things


"...we do not want to know life, which includes death, but we want to know how to continue and not come to an end.

That which continues has no renewal. There can be nothing new, there can be nothing creative, in that which has continuance - which is fairly obvious. It is only when continuity ends that there is a possibility of that which is ever new. But it is this ending that we dread and we don't see that only in ending can there be renewal, the creative, the unknown - not in carrying over from day to day our experiences, our memories and misfortunes. It is only when we die each day to all that is old that there can be the new. The new cannot be where there is continuity - the new being the creative, the unknown, the eternal, God or what you will. The person, the continuous entity, who seeks the unknown, the real, the eternal, will never find it, because he can find only that which he projects out of himself and that which he projects is not the real. Only in ending, in dying, can the new be known; and the man who seeks to find a relationship between life and death, to bridge the continuous with that which he thinks is beyond, is living in a fictitious, unreal world, which is a projection of himself.

Now is it possible, while living, to die - which means coming to an end, being as nothing?"

The First and Last Freedom, p.236-237


"The fact is that life is like the river: endlessly moving on, ever seeking, exploring, pushing, overflowing its banks, penetrating every crevice with its water. But, you see, the mind won't allow that to happen to itself. The mind sees that it is dangerous, risky to live in a state of impermanency, insecurity, so it builds a wall around itself: the wall of tradition, of organized religion, of political and social theories. Family, name, property, the little virtues that we have cultivated - these are all within the walls, away from life. Life is moving, impermanent, and it ceaselessly tries to penetrate, to break down these walls, behind which there is confusion and misery. The gods within the walls are all false gods, and their writings and philosophies have no meaning because life is beyond them.

A mind which is seeking permanency soon stagnates; like that pool along the river, it is soon full of corruption, decay. Only the mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, timelessly pushing on, exploring, exploding - only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself."

This Matter of Culture, Ch.17