100 marvellous great quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

Audi doctrinam, si vis vitare ruinam: cum sine doctrina nil proficiat medicina.
Proverbium mediaevale

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem he must solve.
Erich Fromm

When muslims become Osho’s followers I will trust them a little bit more.
Carl William Brown

Sobriety distinguishes, discriminates, and says no. Intoxication expands, unites, and says yes.
William James

We’ll meet again in the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams.
Lewis Caroll

The ethics of knowledge and social justice do not exist; instead, there is the use of force, abuse of power, and institutionalized fraud to safeguard privilege, injustice, and the spread of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The man who cannot create wants to destroy.
Erich Fromm

Stupid people ask about God, the intelligent person asks about death. The people who go on asking about God never find God, and the person who asks about death is bound to find God
Osho

We survive by what we receive, but we live by what we give.
Carl Gustav Jung

Syncretinism is santanic!
Carl William Brown

What the herd hates most is a person who thinks differently.
Arthur Shopenhauer

Coniunctio or Coincidentia Oppositorum: if everything makes sense, then nothing makes sense; that’s why we live in a painful and absurd world.
Carl William Brown

I turn cruel when I am empty, If I cannot be loved, I must be feared.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

Literature is a defence against the insults of life.
Cesare Pavese

The result of every life is completely erroneous, so why the bothering of calculation, or of having faith.
Carl William Brown

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead

To be happy you must eliminate two things: The fear of a bad future and The memory of a bad past.
Seneca

From the beginning till the end the entire life is a whole process of learning, of how useless it all has been.
Carl William Brown

What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world actually belongs to you?
Marcus Aurelius

The human soul is “symphonic”; music is part of the profound nature.
Hildegard of Bingen

Never play fair in a game where others cheat.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Too many pacifists around, we need a good war here too, like in the good old days, the only hygiene for a world too full of idiots.
Carl William Brown

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.
Hildegard von Bingen

Humor is the weapon of the wise for it disarms the arrogant.
Aristophanes

Silence was fundamental for Osho, also because most of the time, speaking is useless, given the ordinary human capacity for understanding.
Carl William Brown

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.
Hildegard von Bingen

Highly intelligent people cannot be evil, because evil requires stupidity and a limited mind.
J.P. Sartre

I wouldn’t like to die alone; it would be better to be in good company, but whose one? Unfortunately, choices have always been my weakness.
Carl William Brown

Se viviamo, è per camminare sulla testa dei Re.
William Shakespeare

We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Hildegard von Bingen

Never let the future disturb you. you will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason that arm you today, against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.
Tao Te Ching

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Seneca

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.
Oscar Wilde

Peace is defined not merely by the absence of war, but as a proactive state characterized by the presence of justice, equity, understanding, and human rights.
Martin Luther King Via Baruch Spinoza

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza

In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.”
Aldous Huxley

Stupid matter uses even its most brilliant scientific minds to spread its own harmful imbecility.
Carl William Brown

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
Moliere

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
Bertrand Russell

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Terence McKenna

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
Confucius

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges

In my mother’s brain, the disease had devastated the garden of memory, but perhaps not yet the palace of dreams. Then, however, death came, and everything collapsed.
Carl William Brown

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.
Voltaire

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
Aldous Huxley

Because there is no man who can be true and just judge of himself, so much will self-love deceive him.
Dante

You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
Karl Popper

Reason is the root through which the resonant word blossoms.
Hildegard of Bingen

Your emotions are servants, not masters. Keep them in line.
Marcus Aurelius

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs.
Arthur Schopenhauer

We are all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.
Rudyard Kipling

Galileo said that mathematics is the language in which the book of nature is written, ignoring the fact that nature has no need of books, nor of mathematics, nor of Galileo.
Carl William Brown

Celui qui serait sage n’aurait pas de fou; celui qui a un fou n’est pas sage; s’il n’est pas sage, il est fou; et peut-être, fût-il roi, le fou de son fou.
Denis Diderot

What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.
George Orwell

L’histoire ne vous fournit que des exemples de paix violées, de guerres injustes et cruelles, des champs dévastés de villes réduites en cendres.
Diderot Encyclopédie, article (Paix)

Solitude is the school of genius.
Edward Gibbon

If you are not a master of yourself, then trying to be a master of others is just a substitute to befool yourself, to deceive yourself, and that is what the stupidity consists of.
Osho

There is no pain that the passage of time does not diminish or students. (Nullus pain est quem non longinquitas temporis minuat ac molliat).
Marcus Tullius Cicero

The most stupid thinks that he is very intelligent. Hence you go on giving compliments to each other. All those compliments are lies – and everybody is ready to believe.
Osho

Desiring life, in any case, and to the full extent of this desire, is nothing other than desiring unhappiness; desiring to live is as much as desiring to be unhappy.
Giacomo Leopardi

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.
Voltaire

Inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist.
George Carlin

People are so fucking stupid. No one reads anymore, no one goes out and watches and explores the society and culture they grew up in. People have five-second attention spans and the depth of a glass of water.
David Bowie

A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.
Osho

Lack of judgment is precisely what is called stupidity, and there is absolutely no remedy for this defect. A dull and limited brain, lacking nothing except a suitable measure of intellect and precision in its concepts, can certainly be trained through study, even to the point of achieving erudition. However, since judgment is usually also lacking in such cases, one not infrequently encounters highly erudite men who, in the use of their knowledge, often reveal this incurable defect.
Immanuel Kant

Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. This is the inevitable consequence of any system that seeks to control thought, to suppress dissent, to impose a single, unchallengeable doctrine.
Karl Popper

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
Ludwig von Mises

When a clown seats himself on the throne he does not become a king, the kingdom becomes a circus!
Turkish proverb

If we want to discover what is true, we must be completely free from all religions, all conditioning, all dogmas, all beliefs, and any authority that pushes us to conform; essentially, to be completely alone, and that is very difficult.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Man is so stupid, unbelievably stupid. He goes on throwing the responsibility on somebody else. Unless you stop this you will never become religious.
Osho

Love is the only sensible and satisfying answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

I am not anti-life as other religions are. I am absolutely for life, and life in its essence means love.
Osho

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Achieve some perfection yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The successful revolutionary is a statesman; the unsuccessful one is a criminal.
Erich Fromm

Humanity will never be religious unless all organized religions disappear and religion becomes an individual commitment towards existence.
Osho

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every miserable fool, who has nothing in the world to be proud of, clings to the last resource to be proud of, namely, the nation to which he belongs: in this way he comforts himself and is now full of gratitude and ready to defend tooth and nail all the defects and all the foolishness characteristic of that nation.
Arthur Schopenhauer

To be crazy, some intelligence is needed.
Osho

Essere intelligenti è una maledizione diceva Schopenhauer. Infatti: capisci il gioco, osservi le menzogne, riconosci gli schemi. Ma devi comunque fingerti stupido per sopravvivere.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The first necessity is to realize the evils of the world.
Bertrand Russell

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Carl Gustav Jung

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo

The Vatican has always been corrupted, first of all by stupidity.
Carl William Brown

It is undesirable to believe a proposition to be true when there is no basis for supposing it to be actually true.
Bertrand Russell

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller

God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly.
Osho

Man is the only animal for whom his own stupid existence is a problem which he has to try in vain to solve.
Carl William Brown via Eric Fromm

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

If a person has known only sex as life, he is stupid, he is an idiot.
Osho

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

An anonymous man from the 16th century always used to say: “There are many important things in life, the first is eating, I don’t know the others.”
Carl William Brown

If somebody moves from poverty into spirituality, he has great intelligence. And if someone remains in richness and still does not move towards spirituality, he is just stupid and nothing else.
Osho

The secret of happiness lies in facing the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
Bertrand Russell

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
Mahatma Gandhi

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.
Thomas Jefferson

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100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Gustav Jung

Tutte le religioni. Tutto questo canto. Un solo canto. La pace sia con voi.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Go easy on yourself, for the outcome of all affairs is determined by God’s decree.
Osho

The act of disobedience, as an act of freedom, is the beginning of reason.
Erich Fromm

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect … Your have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Carl Gustav Jung

Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.
Osho

The ancestors. The dead. It is not a mere metaphor, an encrypted message to indicate the unconscious or something like that. When he speaks of the dead, Jung means the dead. And they are present in the images, they continue to live.
Sonu Shamdasani

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

There is the music of Heaven in all things.
Hildegard von Bingen

What shall I say, O Muslims? I do not know myself; I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian, nor Muslim.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.
Warren Buffett

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
Oscar Wilde

The utter stupidity of humanity and its leaders is also demonstrated by the fact that thousands of atomic bombs have been built without intending to use them; perhaps they are considered a long-term investment.
Carl William Brown

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Frankly, if a fateful and providential disaster were to wipe out two-thirds of the world’s population, I couldn’t help but be happy. I suffer more when I see a leaf fall from a tree.
Carl William Brown

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Carl Gustav Jung

The development and growth of tools connected to or managed by artificial intelligence proceeds proportionally with the general imbecility of the world population.
Carl William Brown

I have always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all, but glory.
Cicero

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Gustav Jung

As artificial intelligence develops, natural stupidity also increases indiscriminately.
Carl William Brown

All your knowledge is dust. Knowing is your purity, knowledge is dust.
Osho

The cyclical and repetitive essence of matter, while astonishing on the one hand, is also monotonous and boring, comical and pathetic on the other.
Carl William Brown

Hildegard, the human soul is ‘symphonic’; music is part of the profound nature.
Hildegard von Bingen

Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed, and in the process, a huge pain in the ass is created.
Carl William Brown

Socialism may begin with the best of intentions, but it always ends with the Gestapo.
Winston Churchill

Anger transformed becomes compassion. Sex transformed becomes prayer. Greed transformed becomes sharing.
Osho

Ai bambini bisogna insegnare a pensare, non cosa pensare.
Margaret Mead

I dropped out of school at age 15 with virtually no money and no education. If I could make big money in the stock market, think about how well you can do. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to achieve far more than I have.
Mark Minervini

Where the environment is stupid, or prejudiced, or cruel, it is a mark of merit to oppose it.
Bertrand Russell

A man is born to work, to suffer and to fight; he who doesn’t, must perish.
Nikola Tesla

We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
David Clark

Individual imbecility, integrating and adapting to universal stupidity, can generate a certain unconscious and fleeting satisfaction.
Carl William Brown

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
Denis Diderot

Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.
Anne Frank

The historian, the futurist, the surrealist, and the nihilist move in environments that do not exist, following the trail of death and stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Mathematics is just a language, and as such, it’s conventional, arbitrary, and capable of expressing a lot of bullshit.
Carl William Brown

But the devil was so tired that he left everything to men, who knew how to do things better than he did.
Leonardo Sciascia

Social life is a distraction, real intelligence thrives in isolation.
Nikola Tesla

War in Iran, China offers the Islamic regime the following sacred texts: The Art of War (Sun Tzu), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), The Analects (Confucius), the Bible (Various Authors), all accompanied by a huge load of pork.
Carl William Brown

C’è la musica del Cielo in tutte le cose.
Ildegarda di Bingen

Why look for conspiracy when stupidity explains so much.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.
Albert Einstein

I have great faith in fools, – self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe

Wealth and poverty do not lie in a person’s estate, but in their souls.
Antisthenes

If you want to avoid seeing an idiot, break the mirror.
Francois Rabelais

Civilized man has traded a portion of his chance for happiness for a measure of security.
Sigmund Freud

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake

What shall I say, O Muslims, I know not myself, I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The father of modern stress research, Hans Seyle, claims that stress doesn’t depend so much on what happens, but on how we interpret it. That may be true, but I wish him every possible misfortune, and then we’ll see.
Carl William Brown

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf

You must also give mental and physical fitness priority.
Jim Otto

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Exercise should be regarded as tribute to the heart.
Gene Tunney

In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.
Henri Frederic Amiel

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt

I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food.
Erma Bombeck

Reason is the root, through which the resonant word flourishes.
Hildegard von Bingen

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech.
Hildegard von Bingen

Syncretinism is the most updated keyword of the modern catholic church.
Carl William Brown

A nation that displays the shitty faces of poor religious idiots on the walls of its cities must by strict logic necessarily be destroyed, never mind the international law of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Those who lack a certain amount of free time are cut off from many of the best things.
Bertrand Russell

Wise men argue cases, fools decide them.
Anacharsis

If you don’t become aware of the three idiots within you, you will never become a sage. It is by overcoming the three idiots that one truly becomes wise.
Osho

Be kind and honest, and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
Dean William R. Inge

The common man with extraordinary power represents the greatest danger to humanity, not the demon or the sadist.
Erich Fromm

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day…
Lord Byron

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Carl Gustav Jung

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.
Morgan Freeman

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
Aldous Huxley

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

Religion: a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce

A mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table.
Aristotle

A person who lives in a sort of sleep can never be intelligent – and awareness is the purest flame of intelligence.
Osho

El Estado es una banda de ladrones, compuesta por los individuos más inmorales, codiciosos y sin escrúpulos de cada sociedad.
Murray Rothbard

The beautiful is nothing but the terrible at its beginning (Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
Thomas Eliot

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.
Aristophanes

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.
Seneca

I have found God, but he is insufficient.
Henry Miller

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.
Mark Twain

El Estado es peor que una mafia. Es más grande, más criminal y además tiene escuelas. Una mafia normal te roba y te deja en paz.
Miguel Anxo Bastos

Religion is man’s twisted thinking, out of which temples are erected to realize it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Unless a person is stupid he cannot be a politician. It is not that the politicians are stupid – in fact, only stupid people are attracted towards politics.
Osho

Human biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Erich Fromm

The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Gustav Jung

Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very fast.
Thomas Jefferson

To keep the body in good health is a duty… otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.
Buddha

Much learning does not teach understanding.
Heraclitus

God cannot be an object. It is deepest depth of your own being. How can you see it.
Osho

Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.
Marcus T. Cicero

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Aesop

The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.
Marcus Aurelius

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Carl Gustav Jung

The world is full of tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising things, and those who fail to engage with the spectacle it offers miss one of life’s privileges.
Bertrand Russell

The only truly rich are those who desire no more than they already possess.
Erich Fromm

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Carl Gustav Jung best quotes and aphorisms, ideas, thoughts, maxims, and pearls of wisdom from the great Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and philosopher.

Like mists arising from a marsh, the dead came near and cried: Speak further unto us concerning the supreme god. Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest, because man perceiveth it not. From the sun he draweth the summum bonum; from the devil the infimum malum: but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.
Carl Gustav Jung Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. 1916

A collection of a hundred Great brains makes one big fathead.
Carl Gustav Jung

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Carl Gustav Jung

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Carl Gustav Jung

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
Carl Gustav Jung

A ‘scream’ is always just that – a noise and not music.
Carl Gustav Jung

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Carl Gustav Jung

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
Carl Gustav Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Gustav Jung

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture challenging the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man – his daring and his aspirations. Should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?
Carl Gustav Jung

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Carl Gustav Jung

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
Carl Gustav Jung

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
Carl Gustav Jung

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Carl Gustav Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Carl Gustav Jung

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
Carl Gustav Jung

A dream that, despite being manifest, does not interpret itself, and never has a clear meaning. No dream says, “You must,” or “This is the truth.” It presents an image, like nature makes a plant grow, and we must draw the consequences.
Carl Gustav Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
Carl Gustav Jung

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
Carl Gustav Jung

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
Carl Gustav Jung

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
Carl Gustav Jung

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
Carl Gustav Jung

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Carl Gustav Jung

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
Carl Gustav Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Carl Gustav Jung

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Gustav Jung

It is on the whole probable that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
Carl Gustav Jung

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Gustav Jung

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Carl Gustav Jung

Life not lived is a disease from which one can die.
Carl Gustav Jung

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
Carl Gustav Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Carl Gustav Jung

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
Carl Gustav Jung

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
Carl Gustav Jung

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Gustav Jung

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
Carl Gustav Jung

A dream that, despite being manifest, does not interpret itself, and never has a clear meaning. No dream says, “You must,” or “This is the truth.” It presents an image, like nature makes a plant grow, and we must draw the consequences.
Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
Carl Gustav Jung

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.
Carl Gustav Jung

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Gustav Jung

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Gustav Jung

Our blight is ideologies – they are the long-expected Antichrist!
Carl Gustav Jung

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Gustav Jung

Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
Carl Gustav Jung

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
Carl Gustav Jung

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
Carl Gustav Jung

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
Carl Gustav Jung

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality
Carl Gustav Jung

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
Carl Gustav Jung

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
Carl Gustav Jung

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Carl Gustav Jung

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
Carl Gustav Jung

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung

The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.
Carl Gustav Jung

The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.
Carl Gustav Jung

The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Carl Gustav Jung

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Gustav Jung

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
Carl Gustav Jung

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
Carl Gustav Jung

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Gustav Jung

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
Carl Gustav Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Gustav Jung

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Carl Gustav Jung

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Carl Gustav Jung

The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.
Carl Gustav Jung

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Carl Gustav Jung

The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is… lack of faith.
Carl Gustav Jung

The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.
Carl Gustav Jung

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Carl Gustav Jung

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
Carl Gustav Jung

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
Carl Gustav Jung

The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.
Carl Gustav Jung

The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Gustav Jung

There can be no transforming of darkness into light, and of apathy into movement, without emotion.
Carl Gustav Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Gustav Jung

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
Carl Gustav Jung

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
Carl Gustav Jung

We are all born originals and die copies.
Carl Gustav Jung

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
Carl Gustav Jung

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Gustav Jung

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Carl Gustav Jung

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
Carl Gustav Jung

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.
Carl Gustav Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
Carl Gustav Jung

We survive by what we receive, but we live by what we give.
Carl Gustav Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Carl Gustav Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Gustav Jung

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books, but lives in our very blood?
Carl Gustav Jung

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Gustav Jung

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Osho thoughts on stupidity, some quotes and various reflections on intelligence versus stupidity with references to B. Russell, governments and politicians.

Osho’s reflections on Bertrand Russell and stupidity center on the distinction between accumulated knowledge and authentic, living intelligence. He viewed Russell as a highly intellectual man restricted by his reliance on logic, and perceived human stupidity not as a lack of information, but as a state of unconsciousness and rigid adherence to the past. Osho acknowledged Russell’s high intelligence but highlighted his inability to accept certain religious concepts (such as the virgin birth) due to his strictly scientific and logical mind. Osho argued that Russell, while intelligent, was unable to grasp the mystical dimension of truth because he was a philosopher rather than a mystic. Osho felt that individuals like Russell collected points of argument (as in Why I am Not a Christian) but remained trapped within the rational mind, which cannot access true meditation. Osho defined stupidity not as lower IQ, but as living in a state of “sleep,” unawareness, and routine.

Osho insisted that knowledgeable people (those with degrees, degrees, and extensive memory) are often the most stupid, as they use knowledge to hide their lack of being. Stupid minds operate based on past programming, ready-made answers, and fear of the unknown. Osho taught that recognizing one’s own stupidity is the first ray of intelligence. “To understand that one is stupid is to already be intelligent”. Osho proclaimed a need for a revolution against human stupidity, which he believed was leading humanity toward destruction through unconsciousness, environmental ruin, and war.In essence, Osho argued that the only way beyond stupidity is through awareness and meditation, which allow an individual to move from a “knowledgeable mind” to a “conscious being”.

In INTELLIGENCE: The Creative Response to Now, Osho challenges the common conception that the best way to promote intelligence is to train the intellect. Intellect is logical, he says; intelligence is paradoxical. Intellect takes things apart to see how they work; intelligence puts things together to see the functioning of the whole. When our education systems put too much emphasis on developing intellect, an imbalance is created and both the individual and the society suffer. It is only through intelligence that we can respond creatively to the challenges of a changing world. By exploring the distinction between intellect and intelligence, INTELLIGENCE encourages readers to be more aware of how they approach problems – logical, emotional, and practical – and how they solve them.

The coming revolution in the world is not going to be of the poor against the rich, the proletariat against the bourgeois. The coming revolution in the world is going to be between the stupidity of humanity and the intelligentsia.
Osho

To be crazy, some intelligence is needed.
Osho

You will always find stupid, ignorant people very dogmatic. The more ignorant a person is, the more dogmatic. This is one of the greatest misfortunes in the world, that the foolish are absolutely certain, and the wise are hesitant. Buddha is very hesitant.
Osho

If somebody moves from poverty into spirituality, he has great intelligence. And if someone remains in richness and still does not move towards spirituality, he is just stupid and nothing else.
Osho

If you don’t become aware of the three idiots within you, you will never become a sage. It is by overcoming the three idiots that one truly becomes wise.
Osho

Stupid people ask about God, the intelligent person asks about death. The people who go on asking about God never find God, and the person who asks about death is bound to find God
Osho

A person who lives in a sort of sleep can never be intelligent – and awareness is the purest flame of intelligence.
Osho

Man is so stupid, unbelievably stupid. He goes on throwing the responsibility on somebody else. Unless you stop this you will never become religious.
Osho

Unless a person is stupid he cannot be a politician. It is not that the politicians are stupid – in fact, only stupid people are attracted towards politics.
Osho

Stupidity has always the shadow of meanness. The more intelligent you are, the less mean you are. The utterly intelligent person cannot have any meanness; it is impossible. He can have only love and compassion. The stupid person has to be mean because that is the only way he thinks he can win.
Osho

The most stupid thinks that he is very intelligent. Hence you go on giving compliments to each other. All those compliments are lies – and everybody is ready to believe.
Osho

The intelligent person is rebellious. He does not allow others to decide for him; he keeps the right to himself. Hence, stupid people become saints very easily because they allow the society to condition them.
Osho

The group is always ruled by the stupid person. The stupid cannot become intelligent, but the intelligent can relapse easily and become stupid. Have you seen any stupid person doing anything intelligent ever? But you have seen many intelligent people doing stupid actions, foolish actions.
Osho

If a person has known only sex as life, he is stupid, he is an idiot.
Osho

If you are not a master of yourself, then trying to be a master of others is just a substitute to befool yourself, to deceive yourself, and that is what the stupidity consists of.
Osho

The mediocre mind never allows the genius; the mediocre person is happy with other mediocre people. The stupid people are happy with stupid leaders. The more stupid the leader is, the more people are happy – because he looks so much like them.
Osho

A dishonest life cannot be a life of bliss. You think you are deceiving others; you are simply destroying yourself and destroying all possibilities of growth, because growth comes through sincerity, honesty, authenticity. Growth comes through accepting your truth in its total nudity. And then life is certainly a joy, then life is certainly a bliss. But you cannot expect anything else from a scholar. A scholar is bound to be stupid, otherwise why should he be a scholar in the first place? An intelligent person will seek and search for truth. He will not bother about Mahayana sutras and scriptures. I have no respect for scholarship.
Osho

By the time a person becomes old he becomes very cunning – not wise, not intelligent. Remember: if you were stupid when you were a child you will be more stupid when you are old. You will have a long, long-rooted stupidity in you with great foliage and flowers and fruits. Whatsoever you have will grow with your age. If you meditate then meditation will grow. But just by becoming old you cannot be wise.
Osho

Desires are never fulfilled. In the very nature of things they cannot be fulfilled. The wakeful person looks into the desiring mind and laughs. The desiring mind is the most stupid mind, because it is desiring something which cannot be fulfilled in the very nature of things. Just as you cannot get oil through sand – you can go on and on working on the sand, but you will not get oil out of it, it does not exist in the sand, it is impossible – exactly like that, desire is just a deception.
Osho

If you follow the fool’s way, you can become very rich, you can become famous. You can become a president of a country, a prime minister of a country – you can become anything. You can have as much wealth as you want – just follow the fool’s way. Don’t be intelligent, remain stupid, because in fact, except for a stupid person who wants to run after money? Yes, sometimes it happens, money comes to the intelligent person, but it comes running after him, he does not go… Fame also sometimes comes to the intelligent person. It comes on its own; he is not interested at all.
Osho

Man is so stupid, unbelievably stupid. He goes on throwing the responsibility on somebody else. Unless you stop this you will never become religious. A religious person is one who takes the responsibility upon himself. The first thing that is making you miserable is your desiring, constant desiring for this and that. Stop that. And when there is no desire there are no thoughts either. The function of the thoughts is to help you desire; they are instrumental. If you don’t have desires, thoughts are bound to disappear of their own accord. And when there are no desires, no thoughts… YOU ARE STILL. You are calm, collected, centered, rooted.
Osho

Money is not bad in itself. That’s my basic approach towards existence: money is neutral, it depends on you. In the hands of a man of understanding, money is tremendously beautiful. It can become music, it can become art, it can become science, it can become religion. It is not money that is bad, it is the person. The stupid person, if he has money, does not know what to do with it; his money creates more greed. Money can free you from greed, but the stupid person changes money into more greed. It becomes anger, it becomes sexuality, it becomes lust. The more money the stupid person has, the more stupid he becomes, because he becomes more powerful to do stupid things. With the wise, everything is transformed into wisdom.
Osho

Real intelligence is needed to move from the world of doing to the world of being. If somebody moves from poverty into spirituality, he has great intelligence. And if someone remains in richness and still does not move towards spirituality, he is just stupid and nothing else. Being rich and not being aware of spirituality is stupidity. Being poor and not being aware of spirituality can be forgiven, but the rich person cannot be forgiven – because he HAS – can’t he see that he has everything and yet he has nothing? Death will be coming and it will take all that he possesses. Doing is a means to having. When doing succeeds, you have. But when you have, everything starts failing, everything starts looking futile, everything starts looking childish. And to know that everything in this world is futile is the beginning of turning in, of conversion.
Osho

Somebody says to you, “How beautiful you are!” and you believe it immediately. Nobody ever objects. I have told it to many people; nobody ever objects. I have never come across a person who will object, “No, you are wrong because I know my face. I see it in the mirror every day.” You say it to anybody, even the ugliest. Say it to a camel, and he will nod his head. He will say, “Right. I had always known it. You are the first intelligent person who has given it recognition.” Even the ugliest person deep down thinks he is beautiful. He believes, otherwise it will be difficult to exist, to live. The most stupid thinks that he is very intelligent. Hence you go on giving compliments to each other. All those compliments are lies – and everybody is ready to believe. And it is not only in the ordinary life. When you enter into your inner journey, there also you expect recognition.
Osho

Stupid people ask about God, the intelligent person asks about death. The people who go on asking about God never find God, and the person who asks about death is bound to find God – because it is death that transforms you, your vision. Your consciousness is sharpened because you have raised a real question, an authentic question, the most important question of life. You have created such a great challenge that you can’t remain asleep for long; you will have to be awake, you will have to be alert enough to encounter the reality of death.
Osho

The intelligent person is rebellious. He does not allow others to decide for him; he keeps the right to himself. Hence, stupid people become saints very easily because they allow the society to condition them. At least in that particular society they will be very much respected. To others they will look very stupid, to others they will look insane, but to that particular society which has conditioned them they will be great saints.
Osho

The unintelligent person lives like driftwood; he becomes so much concerned with sightseeing that he forgets all about the ultimate, he forgets all about the goal, he forgets all about the journey. He becomes too absorbed in sightseeing. He is curious but his curiosity is superfluous. He never inquires, because inquiry needs guts, inquiry is risky. Inquiry means you will be facing great problems, you will be coming across ultimate problems, and who knows whether you will be able to solve them or not? He remains only curious. The curious person is the stupid person; his curiosity keeps him occupied, his curiosity keeps him engaged, so he never becomes aware of the real problems.
Osho

There is no greater magic than meditation. To transform the negative into the positive, to transform darkness into light, that is the miracle of meditation. To transform a trembling person into a fearless soul, to transform a person who was clinging to every stupid thing into a nonclinger, into a nonpossessor, that is what happens through meditation. Buddha used to call meditation a great sword, it cuts your problems at the very root. It makes you aware that you need not be afraid of your inner abyss. It is beautiful, it is blissful. You have not experienced its bliss and beauty because you have never gone into it, you have always been escaping. You have not tasted of it; it is nectar, it is not poison. But how are you going to know without tasting it? You are running away from something which can become your life’s fulfillment. You are running away from something which is the only thing worth achieving. You are running away from yourself.
Osho

Unless a person is stupid he cannot be a politician. It is not that the politicians are stupid – in fact, only stupid people are attracted towards politics. What is politics basically? The desire to dominate others – and that is the most stupid thing in life. The intelligent person tries to be a master of himself, and the stupid person tries to be master of others. And how can you be a master of others if you are not a master of yourself? If you are not a master of yourself, then trying to be a master of others is just a substitute to befool yourself, to deceive yourself, and that is what the stupidity consists of.
Osho

Your love affairs are so stupid. And then you are waiting for something great to happen out of them. In the first place you don’t have any love in your heart. That’s why everybody wants to be loved. You want to be loved; your woman also wants to be loved. Naturally there is conflict: both are ready to take and nobody is ready to give. And how to give? You don’t have it in the first place. Only a loving person – one who is already loving – can find the right partner. This is my observation: if you are unhappy you will find somebody who is unhappy. Unhappy people are attracted towards unhappy people. And it is good, it is natural. It is good that the unhappy people are not attracted towards happy people; otherwise they will destroy their happiness. It is perfectly okay. Only happy people are attracted towards happy people. The same attracts the same. Intelligent people are attracted towards intelligent people; stupid people are attracted towards stupid people.
Osho

A person who lives in a sort of sleep can never be intelligent – and awareness is the purest flame of intelligence. A man who lives in sleep becomes more and more stupid. If you live in stupor, you will become stupid, you will become dull. This dullness has to be destroyed. And it can be destroyed only by becoming more aware. Walk with more awareness. Eat with more awareness. Talk with more awareness. Listen with more awareness.
Osho

I would like this country to become rich, scientific, technological, healthy, well nourished – not only this country but the whole of humanity. And I don’t see that it is against religion. On the contrary: the more rich a country is, the more religious it can become – because richness gives you opportunity, richness gives you facility, richness gives you time and space and energy, to move inwards. If you don’t move, that’s your responsibility. Nothing is wrong in being rich. If a rich person is not religious, he is simply mediocre, stupid; it is nothing against richness: it is simply an indication that he is foolish. If a rich person is not religious, I call him stupid; and if a poor person is religious, I call him intelligent, really intelligent. Rare intelligence is needed for the poor man to become religious. When a Kabir becomes religious he shows more intelligence than Buddha himself – because it is impossible, almost impossible to become religious when you are poor. When you have not known what riches are, how can you get beyond them? One can go beyond a certain thing only when it has been experienced; it is only through experience that one surpasses and transcends. If somebody transcends without experiencing something, that simply means that he has such intelligence that he learns from others’ experiences; he need not go into all those things on his own.
Osho

It needs intelligence to be happy, and people are taught to remain unintelligent. The society does not want intelligence to flower. The society does not need intelligence; in fact it is very much afraid of intelligence. The society needs stupid people. Why? – because stupid people are manageable. Intelligent people are not necessarily obedient – they may obey, they may not obey. But the stupid person cannot disobey; he is always ready to be commanded. The stupid person needs somebody to command him, because he has no intelligence to live on his own. He wants somebody to direct him; he seeks and searches his own tyrants.
Osho

Stupidity has always the shadow of meanness. The more intelligent you are, the less mean you are. The utterly intelligent person cannot have any meanness; it is impossible. He can have only love and compassion. The stupid person has to be mean because that is the only way he thinks he can win. The intelligent person has no desire to win, the intelligent person is already victorious in his intelligence. The intelligent person is already superior in his intelligence, he has not to compete for it. The stupid person has to continuously compete. And because he is stupid, he cannot rely on his intelligence, he has to rely on something else: he becomes mean, cunning, deceptive, a hypocrite. To me, stupidity is the only sin, and everything else is just a by-product of it. And intelligence is the only virtue; everything else that we have known as virtue follows it like a shadow.
Osho

The false silence, the pseudo silence, is simply dull. You can see it. If a stupid person is sitting there – an idiot, an imbecile – you will feel a certain silence around him; it is the same silence as you can feel near a cemetery. He has a space around him which is very dull. He seems to be very indifferent to the world, not in contact at all, disconnected; he is sitting there – like a lump of mud. There is no vibration around him of any life, of any energy; there is nothing streaming around him. This is not real silence. He is simply stupid. When you come close to a Buddha, he is silent because of his intelligence, he is silent because of his awareness, he is silent, not because he has forced himself to be silent, he is silent simply because he has understood the pointlessness of being disturbed in any way. He is silent because he has understood that there is no point in being worried and there is no point in being tense. His silence is out of understanding. It is overflowing understanding. When you come near a Buddha you will have a totally different fragrance – the fragrance of consciousness.
Osho

The group is always ruled by the stupid person. The stupid cannot become intelligent, but the intelligent can relapse easily and become stupid. Have you seen any stupid person doing anything intelligent ever? But you have seen many intelligent people doing stupid actions, foolish actions. You can become any moment foolish, but it is not so easy to become any moment wise. A foolish person is very consistent — he remains foolish. He cannot sometimes be wise, it is impossible. But a wise person is not so consistent; sometimes he relapses, becomes foolish. There are foolish moments in his life. There are holidays in his life when he relaxes a little and does not bother about his wisdom. If you are tied to a person who is lower than you in evolution, then you will have to walk with that person. Of course he cannot walk with you. Hence I say I also believe in the rule, but I interpret it in a different way. The rule is perfectly true – THE GROUP ONLY GETS AS HIGH AS ITS LOWEST MEMBER. So if you want to get high, please remember – never become a member of any group. Remember to remain individuals. Then you are free to move at your own pace. Then you are totally free to move alone. In a group you are tied. And of course, stupid people tend to make groups because alone they cannot rely on themselves. They are afraid, they don’t have any intelligence. They know that alone they will be lost. They tend to make groups, crowds. So whenever a church exists, whenever a sect exists, ninety-nine percent it consists of fools. It has to be so. They decide policies of religion, politics and everything. Beware of this mobocracy and be alert.
Osho

The intelligent person does not cling to the dead past, does not carry corpses. Howsoever beautiful they have been, howsoever precious, he does not carry the corpses. He is finished with the past; it is gone, and it is gone forever. But the foolish person is traditional. He is ready to follow the priest, ready to follow any stupid politician, ready to follow any order – anybody with authority and he is ready to fall at his feet. Without intelligence there can be no happiness. Man can only be happy if he is intelligent, utterly intelligent. Meditation is a device to release your intelligence. The more meditative you become, the more intelligent you become. But remember, by intelligence I don’t mean intellectuality. Intellectuality is part of stupidity. Intelligence is a totally different phenomenon, it has nothing to do with the head. Intelligence is something that comes from your very center. It wells up in you, and with it many things start growing in you. You become happy, you become creative, you become rebellious, you become adventurous, you start loving insecurity, you start moving into the unknown. You start living dangerously, because that is the only way to live.
Osho

To be crazy, some intelligence is needed. To be just a part of the collective, no intelligence is needed – any stupid person can become a perfect citizen. In fact, the more stupid you are, the more obedient you will be, the less rebellious you will be. Always you will be ready to fall in line with any fool who comes to command. Anybody who shouts loudly, you will fall into his feet; he will become your leader. But to be an individual you need intelligence, sharp consciousness, because it is very difficult to live an individual life. Surrounded by so many stupid people, surrounded by the crowd, surrounded by the dull and the dead, it is very difficult to remain alive, throbbing, streaming. Then you are very alone.
Osho

You can also read:

Osho quotes and aphorisms

The power of stupidity

Italian stupidity

The triumph of stupidity

Some quotes about stupidity

Stultorum infinitus est numerus

Quotes against power and stupidity 1

Quotes against power and stupidity 2

Struggle against stupidity

Essays with quotes

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

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News and events

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes and aphorisms, great words of wisdom and poetry of the most famous and influential Persian mystics and spiritual poets in history.

A divine dance appears in the soul and the body at the time of peace and union. Anyone can learn the dance, just listen to the music.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A warm, rainy day-this is how it feels when friends get together. Friend refreshes friend then, as flowers do each others, in a spring rain.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A wealth you cannot imagine flows through you. Do not consider what strangers say. Be secluded in your secret heart-house, that bowl of silence.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Achieve some perfection yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

All that you think is rain is not. Behind the veil angels sometimes weep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony. Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think and twice as beautiful as you’d ever imagined.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with, as rose oil imbibes from roses.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

And so it is, that both the Devil and the angelic Spirit present us with objects of desire to awaken our power of choice.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Anyone who genuinely and consistently with both hands looks for something, will find it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Anything which is more than our necessity is poison. It may be power, wealth, hunger, ego, greed, laziness, love, ambition, hate or anything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be a helpful friend, and you will become a green tree with always new fruit, always deeper journeys into love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be grateful for your life, every detail of it, and your face will come to shine like a sun, and everyone who sees it will be made glad and peaceful.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be kind and honest, and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be an empty page, untouched by words.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be drunk with love, for love is all that exists.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be full of sorrow, that you may become hill of joy; weep, that you may break into laughter.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be soulful. Be kind. Be in love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies. Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. You will come to see that all evolves us.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others’ faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be patient where you sit in the dark. The dawn is coming.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be with those who help your being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

By God, when you see your beauty you will be the idol of yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Beyond the rightness or wrongness of things there is a field, I’ll meet you there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

But listen to me. For one moment quit being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Caught by our own thoughts, we worry about everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Clean out your ears, don’t listen for what you already know.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Concentrate on the Essence, concentrate on the light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance where you can break yourself up to pieces and totally abandon your worldly passions.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance, and make joyous the love around you. Dance, and your veils which hide the Light shall swirl in a heap at your feet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance until you shatter yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Daylight, full of small dancing particles and the one great turning, our souls are dancing with you, without feet, they dance. Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets. The moon sets. But they are not gone.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Discard yourself and thereby regain yourself. Spread the trap of humility and ensnare love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do good to the people for the sake of God or for the peace of your own soul that you may always see what is pure and save your heart from the darkness of hate.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do not worry if all the candles in the world flicker and die. We have the spark that starts the fire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do you pay regular visits to yourself? Start now.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t be sad! Because God sends hope in the most desperate moments. Don’t forget, the heaviest rain comes out of the darkest clouds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t dismiss the heart, even if it’s filled with sorrow. God’s treasures are buried in broken hearts.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t make yourself miserable with what is to come or not to come.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t you know yet? It is your Light that lights the worlds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Each moment contains a hundred messages from God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Either give me more wine or leave me alone.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every moment is made glorious by the light of love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every need brings what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child. Having nothing produces provisions. Ask a difficult question, and the marvelous answer appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everyone is overridden by thoughts; that’s why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything about yesterday has gone with yesterday. Today, it is needed to say new things.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything is emptiness. Everything else, accidental. Emptiness brings peace to your loving. Everything else, disease. In this world of trickery, emptiness is what your soul wants.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Friend, our closeness is this: anywhere you put your foot, feel me in the firmness under you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Friendship of the wise is good; a wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. Halfheartedness does not reach into majesty!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Grace comes to forgive and then forgive again.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Gratitude is the wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

How do I know who I am or where I am? How could a single wave locate itself in an ocean.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

However much I might try to expound or explain Love, when I come to Love itself, I am ashamed of my explanations… Love alone can explain the mysteries of love and lovers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am a child whose teacher is love surely my master won’t let me grow to be a fool.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am in the House of Mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am yours. Don’t give myself back to me.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I choose to love you in silence, for in silence I find no rejection. I choose to love you in loneliness, for in loneliness no one owns you but me. I choose to adore you from a distance. For distance will shield me from pain. I choose to kiss you in the wind, for the wind is gentler than my lips. I choose to hold you in my dreams, for me in dreams, you have no ends.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have found the heart and will never leave this house of light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have neither a soul nor a body, for I come from the very Soul of all souls.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have no companion but Love, no beginning, no end, no dawn. The soul calls from within me: ‘You, ignorant of the way of Love, set me free.’
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I learned that every mortal will taste death. But only some will taste life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I lost my hat while gazing at the moon, and then I lost my mind.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you all else melted away.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am not this hair, I am not this skin, I am the soul that lives within.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have no companion but Love, no beginning, no end, no dawn. The Soul calls from within me: ‘You, ignorant of the way of Love, set Me free.’
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have seen the king with a face of Glory, He who is the eye and the sun of heaven, He who is the companion and healer of all beings, He who is the soul and the universe that births souls.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I should be suspicious of what I want.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If light is in your heart, you will find your way home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you find the mirror of the heart dull, the rust has not been cleared from its face.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In the blackest of your moments, wait with no fear.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

It’s your road and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If destiny comes to help you, love will come to meet you. A life without love isn’t a life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If something makes you happy in this world, you should think of what will happen to you if that thing were taken away.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you are looking for a friend who is faultless, you will be friendless.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you love someone, you are always joined with them – in joy, in absence, in solitude, in strife.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you want money more than anything, you’ll be bought and sold your whole life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you want to win hearts, sow the seeds of Love. If you want heaven, stop scattering thorns on the road.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you wish to be a mine of jewels, open the deep ocean within your heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils. And carry you a thousand steps toward your goal.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In order to understand the dance one must be still. And in order to truly understand stillness one must dance.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In their seeking, wisdom and madness are one and the same. On the path of love, friend and stranger are one and the same.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Inside any deep asking is the answering.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

It is certain that an atom of goodness on the path of faith is never lost.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Join the community of saints and know the delight of your own soul. Enter the ruins of your heart and learn the meaning of humility.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Joy lives concealed in grief.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Keep silent, because the world of silence is a vast fullness.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Knock, and He’ll open the door. Vanish, and He’ll make you shine like the sun. Fall, and He’ll raise you to the heavens. Become nothing, and He’ll turn you into everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Laugh as much as you breathe. Love as long as you live.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let silence be the art you practice.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let silence take you to the core of life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let your teacher be love itself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let yourself become living poetry.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let go of your mind and then be mindful. Close your ears and listen.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let us carve gems out of our stony hearts and let them light our path to love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let’s rise above this animalistic behavior and be kind to one another.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Listen to the sound of waves within you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Listen to the unstruck sounds, and what sifts through that music.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love is the water of life, jump into this water.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love is the water of life. Everything other than love for the most beautiful God is agony of the spirit, though it be sugar-eating. What is agony of the spirit? To advance toward death without seizing hold of the water of life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love risks everything and asks for nothing.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love is the bridge between you and everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love will find its way through all languages on its own.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Lovers have heartaches that can’t be cured by drugs or sleep, or games, but only by seeing their beloved.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

May this marriage be full of laughter, our every day in paradise.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Move, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My dear heart, never think you are better than others. Listen to their sorrows with compassion. If you want peace, don’t harbor bad thoughts, do not gossip and don’t teach what you do not know.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousand fold.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My heart, sit only with those who know and understand you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My words are like a ship, and the sea is their meaning. Come to me and I will take you to the depths of spirit. I will meet you there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Now be silent. Let the One who creates the words speak. He made the door. He made the lock. He also made the key.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Now I am sober and there’s only the hangover and the memory of love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

O, happy the soul that saw its own faults.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry moving through and be silent. Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Oh soul, you worry too much. You have seen your own strength. You have seen your own beauty. You have seen your golden wings. Of anything less, why do you worry? You are in truth the soul, of the soul, of the soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Oh! Joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color! For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Oh, bird of my soul, fly away now, For I possess a hundred fortified towers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

On the path of love we are neither masters nor the owners of our lives. We are only a brush in the hand of the master painter.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

On what is fear: Non-acceptance of uncertainty. If we accept that uncertainty, it becomes an adventure!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

One of the marvels of the world: The sight of a soul sitting in prison with the key in its hand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Open your hands if you want to be held.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Patience is the key to joy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Peaceful is the one who’s not concerned with having more or less. Unbound by name and fame, he is free from sorrow from the world and mostly from himself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Plant the love of the holy ones within your spirit; don’t give your heart to anything, but the love of those whose hearts are glad.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Prayer clears the mist and brings back peace to the soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Respond to every call that excites your spirit.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Seek the sound that never ceases. Seek the sun that never sets.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot. Seek the path that demands your whole being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Shine like the whole universe is yours.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Silence gives answers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sit, be still, and listen.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sit quietly and listen for a voice that will say, “Be more silent.” As that happens, your soul starts to revive.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sorrow… It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah… it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stay with friends who support you in these. Talk with them about sacred texts, and how you are doing, and how they are doing, and keep your practices together.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stop, open up, surrender the beloved blind silence. Stay there until you see you’re looking at the light with infinite eyes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Study me as much as you like, you will never know me. For I differ a hundred ways from what you see me to be.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Suffering is a gift; in its hidden mercy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sunlight fell upon the wall; the wall received a borrowed splendor. Why set your heart on a piece of earth, O simple one? Seek out the source which shines forever.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: he’s free.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquillity.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The garden of love is green without limit and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy. Love is beyond either condition: without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The gifts of lovers to one another are, in respect to love, nothing but forms; yet, they testify to invisible love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The lion is most handsome when looking for food.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The moment I first heard love I gave up my soul, my heart, and my eyes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The soul has been given its own ears to hear things mind does not understand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The source of now is here.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The spirit is so near that you can’t see it! But reach for it… don’t be a jar, full of water, whose rim is always dry. Don’t be the rider who gallops all night and never sees the horse that is beneath him.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The way the Beloved can fit in my heart, two thousand lives could fit in this body of mine. One kernel could contain a thousand bushels, and a hundred worlds pass through the eye of the needle.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The wealth within you, your essence, is your kingdom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The whole universe is contained within a single human being – you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a voice that doesn’t use words, listen.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is an invisible strength within us; when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is how it always is when I finish a poem, a great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is the essence of all sciences – that you should know who you will be when the Day of Reckoning arrives.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Through Love all that is bitter will be sweet, Through Love all that is copper will be gold, Through Love all dregs will become wine, through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Tend to your vital heart, and all that you worry about will be solved.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Thankfulness brings you to the place where the beloved lives.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The desire to know your own soul will end all other desires.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The garden of the world has no limit except in your mind.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The garden of the world has no limits except in your mind.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The illuminated life can happen now, in the moments left. Die to your ego, and become a true human being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The message behind the words is the voice of the heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The Prophets accept all agony and trust it. For the water has never feared the fire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The sky will bow down to your beauty, if you do.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The soul is here for its own joy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The universe and the light of the stars come through me.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The very center of your heart is where life begins. The most beautiful place on earth.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The world is a mountain, in which your words are echoed back to you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The wound is the place where the light enters you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are many ways to the Divine. I have chosen the ways of song, dance, and laughter.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that, don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a loneliness more precious than life. There is a freedom more precious than the world. Infinitely more precious than life and the world is that moment when one is alone with God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a moon inside every human being. Learn to be companions with it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a path from me to you that I am constantly looking for.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is no salvation for the soul but to fall in love. Only lovers can escape out of these two worlds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is nothing I want but your presence. In friendship, time dissolves.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is a subtle truth. Whatever you love, you are.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This sky where we live is no place to lose your wings so love, love, love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor… Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This silence, this moment, every moment, if it’s genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There’s nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, ‘Be more silent.’ Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This turning toward what you deeply love saves you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Those who don’t feel this love pulling them like a river, those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of springwater or take in sunset like a supper, those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Till man destroys “self” he is no true friend of God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

To become spiritual, you must die to self, and come alive in the Lord. Only then will the mysteries of God fall from your lips. To die to self through self-discipline causes suffering but brings you everlasting life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

To me, nothing in the world is as precious as a genuine smile, especially from a child.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Today, let us swim wildly, joyously in gratitude.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Touched. How did you get here? Close your eyes… and surrender!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Travel brings power and love back into your life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Travelers, it is late. Life’s sun is going to set. During these brief days that you have strength, be quick and spare no effort of your wings.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Truth lifts the heart, like water refreshes thirst.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Two there are who are never satisfied – the lover of the world and the lover of knowledge.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Water, stories, the body, all the things we do, are mediums that hid and show what’s hidden.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another… It’s all praise, and it’s all right.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We are born of love; Love is our mother.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We are all the same… all the same… longing to find our way back… back to the One… back to the only One!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We came whirling out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust… The stars made a circle, and in the middle, we dance.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What hurts the soul? To live without tasting the water of its own essence.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What will our children do in the morning if they do not see us fly?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What is planted in each person’s soul will sprout.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What shall I say, O Muslims, I know not myself, I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What you seek is seeking you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever happens to you, don’t fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can’t see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path…Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever happens, just keep smiling and lose yourself in love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever purifies you is the right path, I will not try to define it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever lifts the corners of your mouth, trust that.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I die, I shall soar with angels, and when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When the world pushes you to your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When will you begin that long journey into yourself?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When a man makes up a story for his child, he becomes a father and a child together, listening.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When all your desires are distilled; You will cast just two votes – to love more, and be happy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety; If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When setting out on a journey, do not seek advice from those who have never left home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom of the ocean.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When we practice loving kindness and compassion we are the first ones to profit.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you feel a peaceful joy, that’s when you are near truth.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you go through a hard period, when everything seems to oppose you, when you feel you cannot even bear one more minute, never give up! Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you lose all sense of self, the bonds of a thousand chains will vanish.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you seek love with all your heart you shall find its echo in the universe.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whenever sorrow comes, be kind to it. For God has placed a pearl in sorrow’s hand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whenever they rebuild an old building, they must first of all destroy the old one.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wherever water flows, life flourishes: wherever tears fall, divine mercy is shown.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whether one moves slowly or with speed, the one who is a seeker will be a finder.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whoever has heart’s doors wide open, could see the sun itself in every atom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why are you knocking at every door? Go, knock at the door of your own heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why ever talk of miracles when you are destined to become infinite love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why should I be weary when every cell of my body is bursting with life?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison, of all places?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wisdom tells us we are not worthy; love tells us we are. My life flows between the two.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

With every breath, I plant the seeds of devotion, I am a farmer of the heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

With life as short as a half-taken breath, don’t plant anything but love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Without love, all worship is a burden, all dancing is a chore, all music is mere noise.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Work. Keep digging your well. Water is there somewhere.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You are not one you are a thousand. Just light your lantern.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You have forgotten the One who doesn’t care about ownership, who doesn’t try to turn a profit from every human exchange.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You know the value of every article of merchandise, but if you don’t know the value of your own soul, it’s all foolishness.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You left and I cried tears of blood. My sorrow grows. Its not just that You left. But when You left my eyes went with You. Now, how will I cry?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You have no need to travel anywhere – journey within yourself. Enter a mine of rubies and bathe in the splendor of your own light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You have within you more love than you could ever understand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your light is more magnificent than sunrise or sunset.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your radiance shines in every atom of creation yet our petty desires keep it hidden.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your task? To work with all the passion of your being to acquire an inner light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You’ve come to know the fortunate and the inauspicious stars, but you don’t know whether you yourself are fortunate or lucky.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections, ideas and thoughts, this Indian philosopher and theologian was the first teacher to spread Eastern religious thought in the United States.

Surely that thing which you fight you become. If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel. If I am brutal and you use brutal methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me. And this we have done for thousands of years. Surely there is a different approach than to meet hate by hate. If I use violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end ceases to be. In this there is no understanding; there is no transcending anger. Anger is to be studied tolerantly and understood; it is not to be overcome through violent means. Anger may be the result of many causes and without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.
We have created the enemy, the bandit, and becoming ourselves the enemy in no way brings about an end to enmity. We have to understand the cause of enmity and cease to feed it by our thought, feeling, and action. This is an arduous task demanding constant self-awareness and intelligent pliability, for what we are the society, the state is. The enemy and the friend are the outcome of our thought and action. We are responsible for creating enmity and so it is more important to be aware of our own thought and action than to be concerned with the foe and the friend, for right thinking puts an end to division. Love transcends the friend and the enemy.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness. Is this not what is actually taking place all over the world? Our present education is geared to industrialization and war, its principal aim being to develop efficiency; and we are caught in this machine of ruthless competition and mutual destruction. If education leads to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, has it not utterly failed?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves; and what is important in beginning with ourselves is the intention. The intention must be to understand ourselves and not to leave it to others to transform themselves or to bring about a modified change through revolution, either of the left or of the right. It is important to understand that this is our responsibility, yours and mine…
Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is no ideal in observation. When you have an ideal, you cease to observe, you are then merely approximating the present to the idea, and therefore there is duality, conflict, and all the rest of it. The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe. The experience of the observation is really an astonishing state. In that there is no duality. The mind is simply – aware.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Voilà ce que des millions de personnes soi-disant religieuses ont fait au cours des âges ; soit en s’isolant, en s’en allant dans un désert, sur une montagne ou dans une caverne ; soit en errant de village en village avec un bol de mendiant ; ou bien en se réunissant en groupes, dans des monastères, en vue de contraindre leur esprit à se conformer à des modèles établis.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect … Your have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

We are the world. The world is you and me, the world is not separate from you and me. We have created this world – the world of violence, the world of wars, the world of religious divisions, sex, anxieties, the utter lack of communication with each other, with no sense of compassion, consideration for another. Wherever one goes in any country throughout the world, human beings, that is, you and another, suffer; we are anxious, we are uncertain, we don’t know what is going to happen. Everything has become uncertain. Right through the world as human beings we are in sorrow, fear, anxiety, violence, uncertain of everything, insecure. There is a common relationship between us all. We are the world essentially, basically, fundamentally. The world is you, and you are the world. Realizing that fundamentally, deeply, not romantically, not intellectually but actually, then we see that our problem is a global problem. It is not my problem or your particular problem, it is a human problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Beauty is complete order. But most of us have not that sense of beauty in our lives. We may be great artists, great painters, expert in various things, but in our own daily life, with all the anxieties and miseries, we live, unfortunately, a very disordered life. It is a fact. You may a great scientist, you may be a great expert in a subject, but you have your own problems, struggles, pain, anxieties and the rest of it. We are asking, is it possible to live in complete order within, not impose discipline, control, but to inquire into the nature of this disorder, what are the causes, and to dispel, move away, wash away the cause. Then there is a living order in the universe.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

What will bring peace is inward transformation, which will lead to outward action. Inward transformation is not isolation, is not withdrawal from outward action. On the contrary, there can be right action only when there is right thinking and there is no right thinking when there is no self-knowledge. Without knowing yourself, there is no peace. An Ideal is merely an escape, an avoidance of what is, a contradiction of what is. An ideal prevents direct action upon what is. To have peace, we will have to love, we will have to begin not to live an ideal life but to see things as they are and act upon them, transform them. As long as each one of us is seeking psychological security, the physiological security we need; food, clothing and shelter, is destroyed. Some of you will nod your heads and say, I agree, and go outside and do exactly the same as you have been doing for the last ten or twenty years. Your agreement is merely verbal and has no significance, for the world’s miseries and wars are not going to be stopped by your casual assent. They will be only stopped when you realize the danger, when you realize your responsibility, when you do not leave it to somebody else. If you realize the suffering, if you see the urgency of immediate action and do not postpone, then you will transform yourself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Mais lire, jouer, rire, être cruel, être bon, contempler le fleuve, les nuages, tout cela fait partie de la vie, et si vous ne savez pas lire, si vous ne savez pas marcher, si vous êtes incapable d’apprécier la beauté d’une feuille, vous n’êtes pas vivant. Vous devez comprendre la globalité de la vie, pas simplement une parcelle. Voilà pourquoi vous devez lire, voilà pourquoi vous devez regarder le ciel, voilà pourquoi vous devez chanter, et danser, et écrire des poèmes, et souffrir, et comprendre: car c’est tout cela, la vie.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You are Christians; find out what is true and false in Christianity – and you will then find out what is true. Find out what is true and false in your environment with all its oppressions and cruelties, and then you will find out what is true. Why do you want philosophies?
You are this, which does not satisfy, so you want to be that. If there were an understanding of this, would that come into being? Because you do not understand this, you create that, hoping through that to understand or to escape from this.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter…having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won’t have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don’t know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn’t find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn’t answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You say you love your wife. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don’t like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, ‘As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don’t I begin to hate you.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, “What did that man pick up?” “He picked up a piece of the truth,” said the devil. “That is a very bad business for you, then,” said his friend. “Oh, not at all,” the devil replied, “I am going to help him organize it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

By our pontifical assertions, our superior impatience, and our casual brushing aside of their curiosity, we do not encourage their inquiry, for we are rather apprehensive of what may be asked of us; we do not foster their discontent, for we ourselves have ceased to question.
conformant, notre action et notre pensée deviennent mécaniques, nos réactions de la Terre. Si leurs récits nous satisfont, c’est que nous vivons de découvert par nous-mêmes, rien d’originel, de non corrompu, de clair.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Find out what it means to die – not physically, that’s inevitable – but to die to everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachments, to all the things that you have accumulated, the known, the known pleasures, the known fears. Die to that every minute and you will see what it means to die so that the mind is made fresh, young, and therefore innocent, so that there is incarnation not in a next life, but the next day.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

For the total development of the human being, solitude as a means of cultivating sensitivity becomes a necessity. One has to know what it means to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learnt. One can indicate, but learning by what is indicated is not the experiencing of solitude or meditation. To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learnt without experiencing it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I was supremely happy, for I had seen. Nothing could ever be the same. I have drunk at the clear and pure waters and my thirst was appeased. …I have seen the Light. I have touched compassion which heals all sorrow and suffering; it is not for myself, but for the world. …Love in all its glory has intoxicated my heart; my heart can never be closed. I have drunk at the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds – in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Order is virtue. And order isn’t a thing to be cultivated; you can’t say I will be orderly, I will do this and I won’t do that – then you are merely disciplining yourself, becoming more and more rigid, mechanical. Such a mind is totally incapable of coming upon this beauty that has no name, no expression. Order, like virtue, cannot be cultivated-if you cultivate humility you are obviously not humble; you can cultivate vanity, but to cultivate humility is not possible any more than to cultivate love. So order which is virtue cannot be practised. All that one can do is to see this total disorder within and outside oneself-see it! You can see this total disorder instantly and that is the only thing that matters-to see it instantly.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nous, les êtres humains, somme ce que nous avons été pendant des millions d’années, colossalement avides, envieux, agressifs, jaloux, angoissés et désespérés, avec d’occasionnels éclairs de joie et d’amour. Nous sommes une étrange mixture de haine, de peur et de gentillesse ; nous sommes à la fois violents et en paix. Il y a eu un progrès extérieur depuis le char à boeufs jusqu’à l’avion à réaction, mais psychologiquement l’individu n’a pas du tout changé et c’est l’individu qui, dans le monde entier, a créé les structures des sociétés. Les structures sociales extérieures sont les résultantes des structures intérieures, psychologiques, qui constituent nos relations humaines, car l’individu est le résultat de l’expérience totale de l’homme, de sa connaissance et de son comportement. Chacun de nous est l’entrepôt de tout le passé. L’individu est l’humain qui est toute l’humanité. L’histoire entière de l’homme est écrite en nous-mêmes.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Our look is as bound by time-space as our brain. We never look, we never see beyond this limitation; we do not know how to look through and beyond these fragmentary frontiers. But the eyes have to see beyond them, penetrating deeply and widely, without choosing, without shelter; they have to wander beyond man-made frontiers of ideas and values and to feel beyond love. Then there is a benediction which no god can give.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes. And for this, a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To me, then, true criticism consists in trying to find out the intrinsic worth of the thing itself, and not in attributing a quality to that thing. You attribute a quality to an environment, to an experience, only when you want to derive something from it, when you want to gain or to have power or happiness. Now this destroys true criticism. Your desire is perverted through attributing values, and therefore you cannot see clearly. Instead of trying to see the flower in its original and entire beauty, you look at it through coloured glasses, and therefore you can never see it as it is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Organizations cannot make you free. No man from outside can make you free; nor can organized worship, nor the immolation of yourselves for a cause, make you free; nor can forming yourselves into an organization, nor throwing yourselves into works, make you free. You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when organizations become your chief concern.
How many members are there in it?” That is the first question I am asked by all newspaper reporters. “How many followers have you? By their number we shall judge whether what you say is true or false.” I do not know how many there are. I am not concerned with that. As I said, if there were even one man who had been set free, that were enough.
Again, you have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness. No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key. That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity.
So you will see how absurd is the whole structure that you have built, looking for external help, depending on others for your comfort, for your happiness, for your strength. These can only be found within yourselves.
You are accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what is your spiritual status. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are beautiful or ugly within? Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible? You are not serious in these things.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

All that we have invented, the symbols in the church, the rituals, they are all put there by thought. Thought has invented these things. Invented the savior. Invented the temples of India and the contents of the temples. Thought has invented all these things called sacred. You cannot deny that. So thought in itself is not sacred. And when thought invents God, God is not sacred. So what is sacred? That can only be understood or happen when there is complete freedom, from fear, from sorrow, and when there is this sense of love and compassion with it’s own intelligence. Then when the mind is utterly still, that which is sacred can take place.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

As one sat in the aeroplane amidst all the noise, smoking and loud talking, most unexpectedly, the sense of immensity and that extraordinary benediction which was felt at il L., that imminent feeling of sacredness, began to take place. The body was nervously tense because of the crowd, noise, etc. but in spite of all this, it was there. The pressure and the strain were intense and there was acute pain at the back of the head. There was only this state and there was no observer. The whole body was wholly in it and the feeling of sacredness was so intense that a groan escaped from the body and passengers were sitting in the next seats. It went on for several hours, late into the night. It was as though one was looking, not with eyes only but with a thousand centuries; it was altogether a strange occurrence. The brain was completely empty, all reaction had stopped; during all those hours, one was not aware of this emptiness but only in writing it is the thing known, but this knowledge is only descriptive and not real. That the brain could empty itself is an odd phenomenon. As the eyes were closed, the body, the brain seemed to plunge into unfathomable depths, into states of incredible sensitivity and beauty. The passenger in the next seat began to ask something and having replied, this intensity was there; there was no continuity but only being. And dawn was coming leisurely and the clear sky was filling with light – As this is being written late in the day, with sleepless fatigue, that sacredness is there. The pressure and the strain too.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

How does fear come into this? I had pain yesterday; there is the memory of it and I do not want it again tomorrow. Thinking about the pain of yesterday, thinking which involves the memory of yesterday’s pain, projects the fear of having pain again tomorrow. So it is thought that brings about fear. Thought breeds fear; thought also cultivates pleasure. To understand fear you must also understand pleasure – they are interrelated; without understanding one you cannot understand the other. This means that one cannot say ‘I must only have pleasure and no fear’; fear is the other side of the coin which is called pleasure.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there’s no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man either for gain, for sport, for food, or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Je pense qu’il y a une différence entre l’être humain et l’individu. L’individu est une entité locale, qui vit dans tel pays, qui appartient à telle culture, à telle société, à telle religion. L’être humain n’est pas une entité locale. Il est partout. Si l’individu n’agit que dans un coin du vaste champ de la vie, son action n’aura aucun lien avec la totalité. Veuillez donc tenir présent à l’esprit que ce dont nous parlons est la totalité, non la partie, car dans le plus grand est le plus petit, mais dans le plus petit, le plus grand n’est pas.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

La cause fondamentale du désordre en nous-mêmes est cette recherche d’une réalité promise par autrui. Nous obéissons mécaniquement à celui qui nous promet une vie spirituelle confortable. Alors que la plupart d’entre nous sont opposés à la tyrannie politique et à la dictature, c’est extraordinaire à quel point nous acceptons l’autorité et la tyrannie de ceux qui déforment nos esprits et qui faussent notre mode de vie.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I think it is always important to ask fundamental questions, but when we do ask a fundamental question, most of us are seeking an answer, and then the answer is invariably superficial because there is no yes or no answer to life. Life is a movement, an endless movement, and to inquire into this extraordinary thing called life, with all its innumerable aspects, one must ask fundamental questions and never be satisfied with answers, however satisfactory they may be, because the moment you have an answer, the mind has concluded, and conclusion is not life – it is merely a static state. So what is important is to ask the right question and never be satisfied with the answer, however clever, however logical, because the truth of the question lies beyond the conclusion, beyond the answer, beyond the verbal expression. The mind that asks a question and is merely satisfied with an explanation, a verbal statement, remains superficial. It is only the mind that asks a fundamental question and is capable of pursuing that question to the end – it is only such a mind that can find out what is truth.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.
If I use you for my fulfillment for my happiness, you become very unimportant, because it is my happiness I am concerned with. So when the mind is concerned with the idea that it can have happiness through somebody, through a thing or through an idea, do I not make all these means transitory? Because my concern is then something else, to go further, to catch something beyond.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

La Vérité n’a pas de sentier, et c’est cela sa beauté : elle est vivante. Une chose morte peut avoir un sentier menant à elle, car elle est statique. Mais lorsque vous voyez que la vérité est vivante, mouvante, qu’elle n’a pas de lieu où se reposer, qu’aucun temple, aucune mosquée ou église, qu’aucune religion, qu’aucun maître ou philosophe, bref que rien ne peut vous y conduire . alors vous verrez aussi que cette chose vivante est ce que vous êtes en toute réalité : elle est votre colère, votre brutalité, votre violence, votre désespoir. Elle est l’agonie et la douleur que vous vivez. La vérité est en la compréhension de tout cela, vous ne pouvez le comprendre qu’en sachant le voir dans votre vie. Il est impossible de le voir à travers une idéologie, à travers un écran de mots, à travers l’espoir et la peur.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Meditation is one of the most serious things; you do it all day, in the office, with the family, when you say to somebody “I love you”, when you are considering your children, when you educate them to become soldiers, to kill, to be nationalized, worshipping the flag, educating them to enter into this trap of the modern world; watching all that, realizing your part in it, all that is part of meditation. And when you so meditate you will find in it an extraordinary beauty; you will act rightly at every moment; and if you do not act rightly at a given moment it does not matter, you will pick it up again – you will not waste time in regret. Meditation is part of life, not something different from life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Now, please has created this pattern of social life. We take pleasure in ambition, in competition, in acquiring knowledge or power, or position, prestige, status. And that pursuit of pleasure as ambition, competition, greed, envy, status, domination, power is respectable. It is made respectable by a society which has only one concept: that you shall lead a moral life, which is a respectable life. You can be ambitious, you can be greedy, you can be violent, you can be competitive, you can be a ruthless human being, but society accepts it, because at the end of your ambition, you are either so called successful man with plenty of money, or a failure and therefore a frustrated human being. So social morality is immorality.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

One of our difficulties is, surely, that we want to be happy through something, through a person, through a symbol, through an idea, through virtue, through action, through companionship. We think happiness, or reality, or what you like to call it, can be found through something. Therefore we feel that through action, through companionship, through certain ideas, we will find happiness. So being lonely, I want to find someone or some idea through which I can be happy. But loneliness always remains; it is ever there.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It’s the mirror of your consciousness: this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joys and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

So let us decide whether you want a shelter, a safety zone, which will no longer yield conflict, whether you want to escape from the present conflict to enter a condition in which there shall be no conflict; or whether you are unaware, unconscious of this conflict in which you exist. If you are unconscious of the conflict, that is, the battle that is taking place between that self and the environment, if you are unconscious of that battle, then why do you seek further remedies? Remain unconscious.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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