Krishnamurti, in his own words.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in May 1895 in Madanapalle, a small town in South India. In 1909 his father moved the family to Adyar, near Madras, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. There C. W. Leadbeater picked out the fourteen-year-old as the coming vehicle of a World Teacher, and Annie Besant, the Society’s president, took charge of him and his younger brother, Nitya. An organization, the Order of the Star in the East, was formed with the boy at its head.

Nitya died in November 1925, while Krishnamurti was at sea on the way to India. His foundation says the loss shook his faith in the Theosophists. On 3 August 1929, at a camp in Ommen in the Netherlands, he dissolved the Order and gave back the money and property that had been given to it.

From the early 1930s until his death he traveled the world giving talks, and spent more and more of his time at Ojai in California, Brockwood Park in England and Madras. He founded schools in India, England and California. He died at Ojai on 17 February 1986. His foundations hold transcripts of over five thousand talks and conversations.

His private life is disputed. In 1991 Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of two of his closest associates, published an account of a long, secret relationship between him and her mother. His biographer Mary Lutyens answered with a book of her own, calling Sloss’s heavily biased.

The observer is the observed

When we watch our own anger or fear, it feels as if there are two of us: one who watches and judges, and the anger or fear being watched. He held that the watcher is built from the same memories and reactions as what it watches.

“I see someone, say, with a red shirt on and my immediate reaction is that I like it or that I don’t like it. The like or dislike is the result of my culture, my training, my associations, my inclinations, my acquired and inherited characteristics.”

Freedom from the Known

“The other images are the result of judgements, opinions and conclusions by the observer, and the observer is the result of all the other images – therefore the observer is the observed.”

Freedom from the Known

Watching without condemning

He set awareness against introspection, the habit of examining ourselves in order to improve, which he said ends in frustration.

“Awareness is entirely different. Awareness is observation without condemnation.”

The First and Last Freedom, “On Awareness”

The image between us

In a close relationship, he said, we mostly answer our picture of the other person, built from old hurts and pleasures, more than the person in front of us.

“I have an image about you and you have an image about me. That image has been put together through pleasure, fear, nagging, domination, possession, various hurts, impatience and so on.”

Truth and Actuality, a group dialogue

“You were angry with me yesterday, so I have created an image about you, that you are no longer my friend, that you are ugly, and all the rest of it. If I look at you with that image next time I meet you, that image will distort my perception.”

The Awakening of Intelligence

We see our conditioning when it is disturbed

While things go well, we don’t notice how family, culture, religion and nation have shaped us. We notice in the moment something threatens us.

“When you struggle against any kind of disturbance or defend yourself against any outer or inner threat, then you know you are conditioned.”

Freedom from the Known

Fear lives in thought about time

Set aside physical danger, and he found psychological fear in thinking: about what happened yesterday, and about what might happen tomorrow.

“If there were no tomorrow, no next moment, about which to think in terms of either fear or pleasure, then neither would exist.”

The Flight of the Eagle, “Liberation from Fear”

Nobody can do our looking for us

He asked his audiences not to take his word for anything, and said the same of every teacher.

“Please see the absolute, essential necessity of it, that nobody can teach you about yourself except yourself, so you have to be the guru, the disciple yourself, the teacher yourself, and learn from yourself. What you learn from another is not true.”

Talk 3, Madras, 13 January 1971

He met science most directly with the physicist David Bohm, from the early 1960s until 1983. Their dialogues, published as The Ending of Time and The Future of Humanity, keep returning to his point that the self is put together by thought.

In 1976 he filmed a series of conversations, The Transformation of Man, with Bohm and the psychiatrist David Shainberg, on fragmentation, images and relationship. In 1982 he held four discussions on the roots of psychological disorder with Bohm, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake and an Ojai psychiatrist. In Commentaries on Living he tells of a psychologist who asked him whether therapy could do more than return people to society, and of turning the question back on society.

The overlap with modern psychology is ours to draw. His “images” of other people sit close to what the library calls projection. His watching without condemning is close to what mindfulness research measures, and his account of fear as thought running ahead is close to the research on worry. None of that research set out to test him.

In the Psychology Library: Projection · Rumination · Experiential avoidance

Lines shared under his name, checked against the talks and books.

1. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

   No source found

   Where it’s from

   Not in his talks or books. His own foundation traces it to Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express (1975), which credits it to him without a source.

   What the source says

   The nearest real passage, Commentaries on Living, Series III: Is society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy?

   What changed

   The idea is his. The famous sentence isn’t, as far as anyone has found, and his foundation says so.

2. “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”

   No source found

   Where it’s from

   The earliest written form we found is in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, which says Krishnamurti “once remarked” it, and gives no source.

   What the source says

   The nearest real line, from a talk at Saanen, 23 July 1963: You cannot observe what is if you have an idea or an opinion or say that it’s good or bad or verbalise what you see, what you observe.

   What changed

   Close to his ideas, in words he isn’t recorded saying. Rosenberg reported it as a remark, not a quote.

3. “It seems so impossibly difficult to be simple, to be what you are and not pretend.”

   No source found

   Where it’s from

   Not in the talks and books his foundation publishes online. One book of his letters, Letters to a Young Friend, has no full text online, so we can’t rule it out.

   What the source says

   No passage found.

   What changed

   Shared without a source. We’ll change this if someone shows us the letter.

4. “To be vulnerable is to live, and to withdraw is to die.”

   His, as said

   Where it’s from

   Commentaries on Living, Series II, chapter 20.

   What the source says

   The last sentence of the chapter, word for word.

   What changed

   Nothing. In the chapter, a woman has shut herself off from all but one or two people she can dominate.

“To learn about oneself is not to accumulate knowledge about oneself. To learn about myself I have to observe myself.”

Talk 3, Madras, 13 January 1971

He went on to set out two kinds of learning. One piles up knowledge. The other watches thoughts and motives as they move, and never piles up.

Every line on this page comes from the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust’s own transcripts and book extracts at kfoundation.org, matched word for word. Where a book is quoted, the foundation’s page doesn’t always give a chapter, so neither do we.

The foundation’s headline quotes sometimes reword the passage printed beneath them. We quote only the full passage. The biography comes from his foundations’ own accounts, and where they disagree with each other, on dates for instance, we leave the detail out. Anyone with a source we missed can send it to us.