Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Loneliness

• If you all see the point, if you are all aware of this, loneliness, and running away from it, trying to cover it up, trying to fill it through various forms of entertainment, religious, football or this or that. So that's what we do. Now I'm asking myself: what has brought this loneliness about? Right? What are the reasons for it?
   
• When I am ambitious, I am isolating myself. No? When I am competitive, I am isolating myself; when I want to be superior to you, I am isolating myself; when I am seeking, pursuing pleasure, I am isolating myself. I don't know if you see all this. Right? So, this loneliness is a form of isolation which the mind has cultivated through ambition, through competition, through the desire for success, through the pursuit of pleasure, and this has brought about this sense of complete isolation, loneliness.
   
• I am pointing out how this loneliness takes place. If I don't understand the reason for this loneliness, merely to escape from it, merely to cover it up, merely try to fill it, has no meaning. Therefore I must see how this has come about. And I see ambition has made this - obviously. I am ambitious in the factory, in the office, and I am not ambitious at home - there oh, I am very friendly, affectionate with my children, wife, but I am ambitious outside. So you see what is taking place: so gradually I am isolating myself all the time.
   
• I don't see that loneliness is the action of my thinking which has brought about this division, because I thought I must be a great man, I must do this.
   
• Loneliness is the result of our daily life. Each one of us, from the highest to the lowest, is completely convinced that he is a separate soul, separate entity, and all his activity is self-centred. The daily activity of this self-centredness will inevitably bring about solitude, loneliness, separatism, division.
   
• Can I look at the fact of my loneliness, not running away from it, not trying to find an answer for it, or trying to have a motive to say, 'Look, what am I to do with it?' Can you just look at a fact and keep looking at it?
   
• Most people find it most difficult to look at a fact; look at the fact that you're jealous, look at the fact that you're violent, look at the fact that you are ugly, both facially or inwardly, or you may be most beautiful and look at the fact, in the mirror. To look in the mirror and not compare yourself with somebody else who is more or less. So what happens? Can you look at that loneliness, without any deviation, without any motive, just look?
   
• Look, can I observe my loneliness. And hear all the noise, the emptiness, the silence, the inwardness of it - observing means also listening. Can I do that? It might tell me, it might tell its content, you follow? If I know how to look, if I know how to listen to the thing that I've called loneliness. It may be the most extraordinary factor involved in it. But if I run away, escape, and all that, it's not telling its story to me, it's not revealing its story.
   
• Sir, look. I am asking myself: I am lonely - ambition, greed, competition has brought about this loneliness, and I see the destructive nature of this loneliness; it prevents really affection, care, love and to me that is tremendously important. Loneliness is terrible, it is really destructive, it is poisonous.
   
• Can one remain with that pain? Can I look at that pain, hold it, hold it as a precious jewel - not escape, not suppress, not rationalize it, not seek the cause of it, but hold it as a vessel holds water? Hold this thing called sorrow, the pain, that is, I have lost my son and I am lonely, not to escape from that loneliness, not to suppress it, not to intellectually rationalize it, but to look at that loneliness, understand the depth of it, the nature of it. Loneliness is total isolation which is brought about through our daily activity of selfish ambitions or ideological ambitions, competitions, each one out for himself. Those are the activities which bring about loneliness. But if you run away from it, you will never solve sorrow.
   
• To be lonely, that is to feel oneself isolated, having no relationship with anything; in that sense of loneliness there is despair - there are moods, one is familiar with that sense of loneliness - and one runs away from it by turning on the radio, by reading a book, by sex and ten different activities. That loneliness is the very essence of self-consciousness. And when one goes beyond that, there is this state of attention in which there is complete aloneness, which is not isolation, which is not separation, which is not a withdrawal. Because it is only this aloneness, when the mind is no longer a plaything of thought, when thought has been understood totally - then out of that comes this sense of aloneness. it is that which is innocence, and it is that innocence which is beyond all mortality.