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Great quotes and aphorisms on dreams

The post 100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms first appeared on The World of English.

Carl Gustav Jung best quotes

Carl William Brown — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:59:13 +0000

Carl Gustav Jung best quotes

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

Aphorisms and quotes by Carl 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

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

Carl Gustav Jung quotes and ideas

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

On the same subject you can also read:

Sigmund Freud quotations

Thoughts and reflections on dreams

Freud on humour and jokes

Osho quotes and aphorisms

The post Carl Gustav Jung best quotes first appeared on The World of English.

Osho thoughts on stupidity

Carl William Brown — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:37:34 +0000

Osho thoughts on stupidity

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

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

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

Osho ideas about stupidity

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

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Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

Carl William Brown — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:09:23 +0000

Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

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

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

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

Jiddu Krishnamurti wise thoughts

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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The post Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections first appeared on The World of English.

Erich Fromm Quotations

Carl William Brown — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:22:42 +0000

Eric Fromm great quotes and aphorisms

Erich Fromm quotations, great aphorisms and quotes by the great German psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist.

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Erich Fromm

Authority is not a quality one person “has,” in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Erich Fromm

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich Fromm

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Erich Fromm

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Erich Fromm

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Erich Fromm

Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’
Erich Fromm

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Erich Fromm

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
Erich Fromm

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Erich Fromm

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
Erich Fromm

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
Erich Fromm

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.
Erich Fromm

Man always dies before he is fully born.
Erich Fromm

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

Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Erich Fromm

Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
Erich Fromm

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Erich Fromm

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
Erich Fromm

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
Erich Fromm

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Erich Fromm

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Erich Fromm

Our time simply denies death, and with it the ideological basis of existence. Instead of perceiving death, suffering, and pain as the strongest forces in life, as the basis of human solidarity […] the individual is led or forced to repress the feeling of death as a “scandal.”
Eric Fromm

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Erich Fromm

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
Erich Fromm

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

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
Erich Fromm

Eric Fromm quotes and aphorisms

The consumer’s desires are manufactured by the producer. Despite the competition between various brands, advertising has a general aim, and that is to stimulate the desire for consumption; all companies help each other in exercising this fundamental influence through their respective advertising, while the buyer exercises only secondarily the dubious privilege of choosing between various competing brands.
Erich Fromm

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
Erich Fromm

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
Erich Fromm

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
Erich Fromm

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
Erich Fromm

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind – not the fiend or the sadist.
Erich Fromm

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm

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

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Erich Fromm

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
Erich Fromm

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
Erich Fromm

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
Erich Fromm

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
Erich Fromm

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
Erich Fromm

We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
Erich Fromm

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent – people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
Erich Fromm

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
Erich Fromm

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
Erich Fromm

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Erich Fromm

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Erich Fromm

The post Erich Fromm Quotations first appeared on The World of English.

Quotes, thoughts and ideas by Bertrand Russell

Carl William Brown — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:11:41 +0000

Quotes, thoughts and ideas by Bertrand Russell

Quotes, thoughts and ideas by Bertrand Russell. A rich collection of aphorisms and reflections by the great philosopher, mathematician, logician, teacher, writer, popularizer, pacifist, atheist, and nonconformist.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
Bertrand Russell

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
Bertrand Russell

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
Bertrand Russell

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.
Bertrand Russell

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
Bertrand Russell

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
Bertrand Russell

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
Bertrand Russell

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
Bertrand Russell

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Bertrand Russell

All movements go too far.
Bertrand Russell

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
Bertrand Russell

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell quotes and aphorisms

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.
Bertrand Russell

Boredom is… a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Bertrand Russell

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Bertrand Russell

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Bertrand Russell

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame.
Bertrand Russell

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
Bertrand Russell

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Bertrand Russell

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
Bertrand Russell

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.
Bertrand Russell

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Bertrand Russell

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Bertrand Russell

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Bertrand Russell

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Bertrand Russell

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
Bertrand Russell

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
Bertrand Russell

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.
Bertrand Russell

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.
Bertrand Russell

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Bertrand Russell

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell ideas and thoughts

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
Bertrand Russell

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Bertrand Russell

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
Bertrand Russell

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.
Bertrand Russell

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
Bertrand Russell

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Bertrand Russell

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
Bertrand Russell

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
Bertrand Russell

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
Bertrand Russell

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.
Bertrand Russell

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.
Bertrand Russell

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
Bertrand Russell

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
Bertrand Russell

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Bertrand Russell

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Bertrand Russell

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
Bertrand Russell

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.
Bertrand Russell

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Bertrand Russell

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Bertrand Russell

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Bertrand Russell

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Bertrand Russell

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
Bertrand Russell

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
Bertrand Russell

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?
Bertrand Russell

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Bertrand Russell

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Bertrand Russell

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Bertrand Russell

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell quotes ideas and thoughts

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
Bertrand Russell

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Bertrand Russell

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
Bertrand Russell

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell

Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.
Bertrand Russell

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
Bertrand Russell

Sin is geographical.
Bertrand Russell

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
Bertrand Russell

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.
Bertrand Russell

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
Bertrand Russell

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
Bertrand Russell

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
Bertrand Russell

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand Russell

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.
Bertrand Russell

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
Bertrand Russell

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
Bertrand Russell

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
Bertrand Russell

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Bertrand Russell

The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.
Bertrand Russell

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Bertrand Russell

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Bertrand Russell

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Bertrand Russell

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
Bertrand Russell

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.
Bertrand Russell

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Bertrand Russell

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
Bertrand Russell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Bertrand Russell

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
Bertrand Russell

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
Bertrand Russell

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Bertrand Russell

Philosopher Bertrand Russell AI picture

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
Bertrand Russell

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
Bertrand Russell

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
Bertrand Russell

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.
Bertrand Russell

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
Bertrand Russell

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
Bertrand Russell

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.
Bertrand Russell

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
Bertrand Russell