Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Gurus

• The follower destroys the master as the master destroys the follower. The guru destroys the pupil as the pupil destroys the guru. Through authority you will never find anything. You must be free of authority to find reality.
   
• You seek out a guru, a teacher, a leader, political or other, only when you are confused. Otherwise you never follow anybody. If you are very clear, if you are inwardly a light unto yourself, you will never follow anyone. But because you are not, you follow; you follow out of your confusion, and what you follow must also be confused. Your leaders as well as yourself are confused, politically and religiously. Therefore, first clear up your own confusion, become a light unto yourself, and then the problem will cease.
   
• Are you really going to a guru to be awakened to the truth? Let us think this out very clearly. Surely, when you go to a guru you are actually seeking gratification. That is, you have a problem and your life is a mess; it is in confusion, and because you want to escape from it, you go to somebody whom you call a guru to find consolation verbally or to escape an ideation. That is the actual process, and that process you call seeking truth. That is, you want comfort, you want gratification, you want your confusion cleared away by somebody, and the person who helps you to find escapes you call a guru.
   
• You always choose a guru who will assure you of what you want; therefore, you are not seeking truth, and therefore the guru is not important. You are actually seeking someone who will satisfy you in your desires.
   
• The guru cannot awaken you; all that he can do is to point out what is. Truth is not a thing that can be caught by the mind. The guru can give you words; he can give you an explanation, the symbols of the mind, but the symbol is not the real, and if you are caught in the symbol, you will never find the way. Therefore, that which is important is not the teacher, it is not the symbol, it is not the explanation, but it is you who are seeking truth. To seek rightly is to give attention, not to God, not to truth, because you don't know it, but attention to the problem of your relationship with your wife, your children, your neighbor. When you establish right relationship then you love truth, for truth is not a thing that can be bought, truth does not come into being through self-immolation or through the repetition of mantras. Truth comes into being only when there is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge brings understanding, and when there is understanding, there are no problems.