Interviewer: Why is it we all so desperately want to be loved?
J. KRISHNAMURTI: Because we are so desperately empty, lonely.
Interviewer: But you say that loving is more important than being loved.
J. KRISHNAMURTI: Yes, of course—which means one must understand this emptiness, this loneliness in oneself. A mind that is self-concerned with its own ambitions, greeds, fears, guilt, suffering has no capacity to love. A mind that is divided in itself, that lives in fragments, obviously cannot love. Division implies sorrow; it is the root cause of sorrow—division between ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘they’, the black, the white, the brown and so on. So wherever there is division, fragmentation, love cannot be, because goodness is a state of nondivision. The world itself is indivisible.
Interviewer: You say, in fact, that love can only come into being when there is a total self-abandonment. But how does one achieve self-abandonment?
J. KRISHNAMURTI: Total abandonment can only happen with the understanding of oneself. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom and therefore wisdom and love go together. This means there is love only when I have really understood myself and therefore know in myself there is no fragmentation at all—no sense of anger, ambition, greed, separative activity.
Interviewer: But, you see, we have still to live in society and a rather sick society at that, and this impinges on us: we’re not really free to be ourselves partly because of the society.
J. KRISHNAMURTI: But surely, sir, we are the society. We have built the society—the society is us, the world is us. It’s not that the world is something different from me. I am the result of the world, of the society, the culture, the religion, the environment in which I have lived.
Interviewer: You said, you see, that it is effort that destroys us, that life is a series of battles, and the only happy man is one who is not caught up in effort. But, can you do any work in the world without some hard effort?
J. KRISHNAMURTI: Why not sir? But what is effort? It is a contradiction of energies, isn’t it? One energy opposing another energy.
Interviewer: Couldn’t it be a steadfast drive in one direction?
J. KRISHNAMURTI: If there is one drive, one pursuit, where is the contradiction in that? There is no wastage of energy, no conflict. If I go for a walk, I go for a walk. But if I want to go out for a walk and yet I have to do something else, then the contradiction begins, then conflict, then effort. So that’s why, to understand effort, one has to find out how contradictory we are.
J. Krishnamurti, Book- Meeting Life
Know Thyself 