The Book Of Life: Daily meditations with Krishnamurti

Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens.

You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen — it is only then the that there is a struggle.

A mind that follows a formula through disciplining itself to achieve virtue, creates for itself the problems of immorality.

Self-knowledge is obviously a process, not an end in itself, and to know oneself, one must be aware of oneself in action, which is relationship. You discover yourself, not in isolation, not in withdrawal, but in relationship - in relationship to society, to your wife, your husband, your brother, to man, but to discover how you react, what your response are, requires an extraordinary alertness of mind, a keenness of perception.

The understanding of what you are, whatever it be - ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous - the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives freedom.

After all, a cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations, is really an uncreative mind; it is merely a repetitive mind.

You watch your own mind and you will see that the moment the mind ceases to think in terms of becoming something, there is a cessation of action which is not stagnation; it is a state of total attention, which is goodness.