To understand the totality of this extraordinary thing called life, one must obviously not be too definite about these things. One cannot be definite with something which is so immense, which is not measurable by words. We cannot understand the immeasurable so long as we approach it through time.
Interpretation
Life is vast and cannot be fully understood through rigid definitions or time constraints.
In this quote, Jiddu Krishnamurti emphasizes the complexity and immeasurable nature of life. He suggests that to grasp its totality, one must avoid being overly definite or constrained by words and concepts, as life transcends such limitations. Understanding life requires an openness to its vastness and a recognition that it cannot be comprehensively understood through time alone.
In practice
During a philosophy class discussion on the nature of existence.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.
If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.
If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
The law is reason, free from passion.
I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been... But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.
In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
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