KFT 365 Daily Quote

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. To see what is, without the distortion of one’s own projections and fears, requires an extraordinary quality of attention — not concentration, which always narrows and excludes, but a wide, choiceless awareness in which the totality of life is included: the trivial and the profound, the near and the far, the pleasant and the unpleasant.”

“Relationship is the mirror in which you see yourself as you are. All life is relationship. You cannot live without it, but we have made of it such a painful, contradictory thing. What we are, relationship reflects. When there is no self-knowledge, relationship breeds confusion, conflict, and sorrow. When you begin to understand yourself, relationship takes on a completely different quality — there is no longer seeking in it, no dependency, no demand.”

“To be free of the past is not to forget it. Memory has its function and proper place. But when the past is used as a means of escaping the present, or as a standard by which to judge the present, then the mind is no longer free. The mind that clings to yesterday cannot understand what is happening today. If you would understand life — not just one compartment of it, but the whole movement — you must not allow yesterday to colour and shape what is.”

“Silence is not the absence of noise; it is not the pause between two thoughts. Real silence comes when the mind, having understood the whole process of its own movement, arrives naturally at stillness. In that stillness, which is not emptiness, there is an attention that sees without the observer, that hears without the listener. From that silence, action is not the result of motive but a spontaneous, free, and compassionate response to what is.”

“Love cannot be cultivated; it cannot come through any technique or method. When you see a beautiful sunset, a great painting, or a child’s face, there is a movement in you that thought has not produced. That movement is love. It is not sentimental, not dependent on the giver or receiver. Love is its own eternity; it does not know the division of you and me, near and far. Where love is, there is its perfume, and from that perfume comes right action.”

“We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told — guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled by circumstance and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves, nothing original or pristine. Our minds are the battleground of the past and the future, and it is only when the mind is free from both that it can see what is true.”