On Love and Loneliness - Jiddu Krishnamurti  ## Metadata - Author: **Jiddu Krishnamurti** - Full Title: On Love and Loneliness - Category: #books ## Highlights - The mind has tried to conform to that order, whether it is cultural order, social order, legalistic order, or religious order; it has tried to conform to the pattern established by social activity, by certain leaders, teachers. To me that is not order because in that is implied conformity, and where there is conformity, there is disorder. Where there is the acceptance of authority, there is disorder. Where there is comparative existence—that is, measuring yourself against somebody, comparing yourself with somebody—there is disorder. I will show you why. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpdax4y49251vevq7gkf2pv)) - The mind that records no insult, no flattery, knows what love is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpddsg9r8hgdbak36jzevp2)) - We will come to it by asking what love is. Is love the product of thought? Is love in the field of time? Is love pleasure? Is love something that can be cultivated, practised, put together by thought? In inquiring into this, one has to go into the question: Is love pleasure—sexual or any other kind of pleasure? Our mind is pursuing pleasure all the time: yesterday I had a good meal, the pleasure of that meal is recorded and I want more, a better meal or the same kind of meal tomorrow. I have taken great delight in the sunset, or looking at the moon through the leaves, or seeing a wave far out at sea. That beauty gives great delight, and that is great pleasure. The mind records it and wants it repeated. Thought thinks about sex, thinks, chews over it, wants it repeated; and that you call love. Right? Don’t be shy when we talk about sex, that’s part of your life. You have made it hideous because you have denied every kind of freedom except that one freedom. So is love pleasure? Is love put together by thought, as pleasure is put together by thought? Is love envy? Can anyone love who is envious, who is greedy, ambitious, violent, conforming, obeying, totally in disorder? So what is love? It is not any of these things, obviously. It is not pleasure. Please understand the importance of pleasure. Pleasure is sustained by thought; therefore thought is not love. Thought cannot cultivate love. It can and does cultivate the pursuit of pleasure, as it does fear, but thought cannot create love, or put it together. See the truth. See it and you will put away your ambition, your greed, altogether. So through negation you come to the most extraordinary thing called love, which is the most positive. Disorder in relationship means there is no love, and that disorder exists when there is conformity. So a mind that conforms to a pattern of pleasure, or what it thinks is love, can never know what love is. A mind that has understood the whole ripening of disorder comes to an order which is virtue, therefore which is love. It’s your life, it’s not my life. If you don’t live this way, you will be most unhappy, caught in social disorder, and be dragged forever in that stream. It is only the man who steps out of that stream who knows what love is, what order is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpdfhdc2284tbw0f70tp4ms)) - The word innocency means a mind that does not receive hurts—or give hurt; it is incapable of hurting and also incapable of being hurt, but yet is totally vulnerable. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwgpfssgg4qe1fjmsxwz4p)) - Unfortunately, most of us seek dependence. We want companions, we want friends; we want to live in a state of separation, in a state which brings about conflict. That which is alone can never be in a state of conflict. But mind can never perceive that, can never understand that; it can only know loneliness. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwhkfbk5nr4gbyd8hk2rk8)) - To be related means not to be dependent on each other, not to escape from your loneliness through another, not to try to find comfort, companionship, through another. When you seek comfort through another, are dependent, and so on, can there be any kind of relationship? Aren’t you then using each other? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwj0fd1wzne8y29z731kv4)) - Please, sir, I am asking you most respectfully whether you love anybody at all? You may love your dog, but the dog is your slave. Apart from animals and buildings and books and poetry and the love of the land, do you love anybody? That means not asking anything in return, not asking anything from that person you love, not being dependent on that person at all. Because if you are dependent, then fear, jealousy, anxiety, hatred, anger begin. If you are attached to somebody, is that love? Find out! And if all that is not love—I am just asking, I don’t say it is or it is not—then how can you have compassion? We are asking for something much more than love when we don’t even have just ordinary love for another human being. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwjqt4bx67aqh38fzqk6xx)) - I do know that I am terribly attached to someone, and that in that attachment there is fear, there is jealousy, there is anxiety, there is a sense of dependency. I don’t like to depend, but I depend because I am lonely and I’m shoved around by society, in the office, in the factory, and I come home and I want to feel comfort, companionship, to escape from myself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwkn2tk8mepgyhj72ecq5x)) - Where there is dependence, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is authority, there is no love. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwm4sxx3w7zzc3q87g5b5a)) - One has seen the torture of love, the dependence on it, the fear of it, the loneliness of not being loved, and the everlasting seeking of it in all kinds of relationships, never finding it to one’s complete satisfaction. So one asks, is love satisfaction and, at the same time, a torture hedged about by jealousy, envy, hatred, anger, dependence? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpwmf9gjfjhdjv5f630k37y))