Kinfonet Quote of the Day: Life is a battle of ideas, a battle of influences, and your mind is the field of the battle.

Krishnamurti Quote Archives » March 2010 » Quote For March 24, 2010

«« previous quote

Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Poona, Maharastra, India | 5th Public Talk 21st September 1958

Why are we influenced? In politics, as you know, it is the job of the politician to influence us; and every book, every teacher, every guru - the more powerful, the more eloquent the better we like it - imposes his thought, his way of life, his manner of conduct, upon us. So life is a battle of ideas, a battle of influences, and your mind is the field of the battle. The politician wants your mind; the guru wants your mind; the saint says, do this and not that, and he also wants your mind; and every tradition, every form of habit or custom, influences, shapes, guides, controls your mind. I think that is fairly obvious. It would be absurd to deny it. The fact is so.

Tags: authority, control, influence

Related Quotes: your own experience, which has become your authority; The worship of authority, whether in big or little things, is evil, the more so in religious matters.; Instead of addressing heterogeneous crowds in many places and dazzling and confounding them with your brilliance and subtlety, why do you not start a community or colony and create a reference for your way of thinking?; Philosophy means love of truth, not love of thought.; What happens to a mind that lives on books - which we are all doing, not only in the schools, colleges and universities, but also religiously?; The negation of all values, of all morality, of all beliefs, having no frontiers, cannot be in opposition to anything.; The poison and corruption begin when you look to one person as your authority, your guide, your saviour.; Sir, don't follow any authority. Authority is evil. Authority destroys, authority perverts, authority corrupts;; You cannot perceive if you do not ask the right question - and a right question has no answer, because it needs no answer.; You cannot find out what is true by assertion. You must sweep the slate completely clean of the known before you can find out.; It is one fact in life, we are all going to die. That is an absolute, irrevocable fact.; The man who is bound either by an external or an inner law is confined in a prison; he is held by an illusion.; You have rejected only the outward picture, and have created in its place an inner picture to which you are a slave.; I feel that what I have to say is inherently right in itself. It does not depend on titles or degrees, revelation or authority.; We accept thoughtlessly or unconsciously so many conditions imposed by society or by religion, accept them as being true.; Belief is merely an escape from the present conflict.; An authority seasoned through the mists of time becomes invulnerable, and then man accepts that authority as being final.; What happens when the`thinker' sees that he is the thought - which he is - that the experiencer' is the experience?; The essence of control is suppression.; Meditation, along that quiet and deserted road came like a soft rain over the hills; it came as easily and naturally as the coming night.; Let the thing that you are watching tell its story, rather than you tell it what it should be.; Sir, don't follow any authority. Authority is evil. Authority destroys, authority perverts, authority corrupts;; Freedom is born of the perception that freedom is essential.; We all need a quiet mind, a peaceful mind, an absolutely silent mind without a murmur of thought. Is that possible? Possible means we don't know.; The energy which seeks truth creates its own discipline without any form of imposition; and as the river finds the sea, so that energy finds its own freedom.; To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.; If I have the whole picture in mind then I can take in the detail; but if my mind only operates in a detail then I cannot take in the whole.; I feel that a radical change can come only when there is no effort, when the mind is not trying to become something, not trying to be virtuous - which does not mean that the mind must be nonvirtuous.; What you call intuition is merely the unfettered fulfillment of your own secret hopes and desires.; Everything we see, every thought we have, shapes our mind; whatever you think now, whatever you have thought in the past and whatever you are going to think in the future, it all shapes the mind.; The mind is never free, pliable, for it is always anchored; it moves within the radius, narrow or wide, of its own centre.; I must change because I know I am dull, stupid, envious, anxious, fearful, and every pleasure is vanishing, and I want to change so radically, so totally, that my mind is new.; Intelligence is necessary to be supremely happy and to awaken that intelligence, the mind must be free of environment.; When we say we seek out or cultivate a new value, it is but the overcoming of that in which the mind is already caught up, which is its opposite.