Beauty is supreme sensitivity to humanity

Why don’t you know what beauty is?
“Instead of looking at pictures, paintings, and the statues of the ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and the modern, but we are looking, asking, enquiring, demanding to find out what is beauty. Not the form, not a woman or a man, or a small child that's extraordinarily beautiful – all children are. So what is beauty? I'm asking the question, sir, please answer it to yourself first. Or you've never thought about it.” J. Krishnamurti
Why don't you know? Why haven't we enquired into this enormous question? You have your own poets, from the ancient people to now. They write about it, they sing about it, they dance, and you say, 'I don't know what beauty is'. What a strange people we are. But if you ask what's your guru, who is your guru, who is your god – I believe there are 300,000 gods in India, pretty good! In Europe and America there is only one god. With you there are 300,000 more – you can choose any one of them to amuse yourself.

Beauty is sensitivity and observation
Many of you live in cities with all the crowds, noise, and dirt in the environment. Probably you have not often come across nature. But there is this marvelous sea, and you have no relationship to it. You look at it, perhaps you swim there, but the feeling of this sea with its enormous vitality and energy, the beauty of a wave crashing upon the shore – there is no communication between that marvelous movement of the sea and yourself. And if you have no relationship with that, how can you have relationship with another? If you don’t perceive the sea, the quality of the water, the waves, the great vitality of the tide going out and coming in, how can you be aware, or be sensitive to human relationship? Please, it is very important to understand this, because beauty is not merely in the physical form, but beauty in essence is that quality of sensitivity, the quality of observation of nature." Krishnamurti, On Nature and the Environment, pages 84-85

Beauty is supreme sensitivity to humanity
“The movement of thought is not beauty. Thought can create what appears to be beautiful – the painting, the marble figure or a lovely poem – but this is not beauty. Beauty is supreme sensitivity, not to the sense of one’s own pains and anxieties, but encompassing the whole existence of humanity.”

Don’t think about your experience of beauty
“When you see something extraordinarily beautiful, full of life and beauty, you must never let thought come in, because the moment thought touches it, thought being old, it will pervert it into pleasure and, therefore, there arises the demand for pleasure and for more and more of pleasure; and when it is not given, there is conflict, there is fear. So, is it possible to look at a thing without thought?
J. Krishnamurti

Resist the need for sensation, feeling, intellect (J. Krishnamurti)
“Line and form become extraordinarily important to those who are in bondage to the sensate; then beauty is sensation, goodness a feeling, and truth a matter of intellection. When sensations dominate, comfort becomes essential, not only to the body, but also to the psyche; and comfort, especially that of the mind, is corroding, leading to illusion.” Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living, First Series, 113

Beauty is not that which stimulates. Beauty is sacredness.
“The essence of religion is sacredness. But sacredness is not in any church, in any temple, in any mosque, in any image. I am talking about the essence, and not about the things which we call sacred. And when one understands this essence of religion, which is sacredness, then life has a different meaning altogether; then everything has beauty, and beauty is sacredness. Beauty is not that which stimulates. When you see a mountain, a building, a river, a valley, a flower, or a face, you may say it is beautiful because you are stimulated by it. But the beauty about which I am talking offers no stimulation whatsoever. It is a beauty not to be found in any picture, in any symbol, in any word, in any music. That beauty is sacredness, it is the essence of a religious mind, of a mind that is clear in its self-knowing. Once comes upon that beauty, not by desiring, wanting, longing for the experience, but only when all desire for experience has come to an end - and that is one of the most difficult things to understand.”

Beauty is passion
“What is ecstasy? When you look at a cloud, at the light in that cloud, there is beauty. Beauty is passion. To see the beauty of a cloud or the beauty of light on a tree, there must be passion, there must be intensity. In this intensity, this passion, there is no sentiment whatsoever, no feeling of like or dislike. Ecstasy is not personal; ecstasy is not yours or mine, just as love is not yours or mine. When there is pleasure it is yours or mine. When there is that meditative mind it has its own ecstasy – which is not to be described, not to be put into words.” J. Krishnamurti, The Flight of the Eagle, 110
“When you see something extraordinarily beautiful, full of life and beauty, you must never let thought come in, because the moment thought touches it, thought being old, it will pervert it into pleasure and, therefore, there arises the demand for pleasure and for more and more of pleasure; and when it is not given, there is conflict, there is fear. So, is it possible to look at a thing without thought?”

“One has to understand what it is to be alone, for beauty is aloneness.” J. Krishnamurti, Discussion 2, Saanen, Aug 5 1965
“Beauty may be truth. Beauty may be love. And without understanding the nature and the depth of that extraordinary word ‘beauty’ it is inevitable that we shall never be able to come upon that which is sacred.”

“For most of us, beauty is a stimulation, a reaction. We depend on a stimulus to make us feel beauty, or to see beauty. We say, ‘What a lovely sunset,’ or, ‘What a beautiful building.’ But there is a beauty which is not a stimulus at all, which is not the result of a stimulant, and that beauty cannot exist without great simplicity. Simplicity is not a matter of how much or how little one has, but it comes about when there is the clarity of self-knowing, self-learning; and this simplicity is the nature of humility, which is austerity.”

How to appreciate beauty?
Beauty is finding out what is eternal.
For most of us, beauty is a matter of proportion, shape, size, contour, color. We see a building, a tree, a mountain, a river, and we say it is beautiful; but there is still the outsider, the experiencer who is looking at these things, and therefore what we call beauty is still within the field of time. But I feel that beauty is beyond time and that to know beauty there must be the ending of the experiencer. The experiencer is merely an accumulation of experience from which to judge, to evaluate, to think. When the mind looks at a picture, or listens to music, or sees the swift flowing of a river, it generally does so from that background of accumulated experience; it is looking from the past, from the field of time –and to me that is not to know beauty at all. To know beauty, which is to find out what is the eternal, is possible only when the mind is completely alone – and that has nothing whatsoever to do with what the priests say, with what the organized religions say. The mind must be totally uninfluenced, uncontaminated by society, by the psychological structure of greed, envy, anxiety, fear. It must be completely free of all that. Out of this freedom comes aloneness, and it is only in the state of aloneness that the mind can know that which is beyond the field of time.
Beauty and that which is eternal cannot be separated. You may paint, you may write, you may observe nature, but if there is the activity of the self in any form – any self-centered movement of thought – then what you perceive ceases to be beauty because it is still within the field of time; and if you don’t understand beauty, you cannot possibly find out what is the eternal because the two go together. To find out what is the eternal, the immortal, your mind must be free of time – time being tradition, the accumulated knowledge and experience of the past. It is not a question of what you believe or disbelieve – that is immature, utterly juvenile, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the matter. But the mind that is in earnest, that really wants to find out, will relinquish totally the self-centered activity of isolation, and will thereby come upon a state in which it is completely alone; and it is only in that state of complete aloneness that there can be the comprehension of beauty, of that which is eternal.
The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti -Volume XIV 1963-1964: The New Mind
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Public talk 2, Rajghat, India, Nov 19 1985.
Shall we talk about beauty for a while? Would it interest you? Don't say yes. It's a very serious subject, like everything in life. So please, probably you've never asked what is beauty - not the beauty of a woman.
So to listen, not only to our own inward thoughts, feelings, and our opinions and judgments, but also to hear the sound of what other people are saying - not your gurus, those are all rather childish - but what other people are saying, what your wife is saying, what your neighbour is saying, to listen to all the sound of that crow, to feel the beauty of the world, the beauty of nature. So, we're going to for the moment enquire into what is beauty. Right? Because you are passing in that train the most wonderful scenery - the hills, the rivers, the great snow-clad mountains, deep valleys. Not only things outside of you but also the inward structure, nature of your own being - what you think, what you feel, what your desires are. One has to listen to all this. Not just say yes, right, wrong, this is what I think, what I shouldn't think, or just merely follow some tradition, either modern tradition, with the psychology, physicists, doctors, computer experts, and so on, but also to listen very quietly, without any reaction, to see the beauty of a tree. So we're going to together talk about beauty.
What is beauty? Have you been to museums? In the old Middle Ages, or Renaissance, of the great painters, have you seen them, some of you? Probably not. I won't take you around the museum, I'm not a guide. But instead of looking at pictures, paintings, and the statues of the ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and the modern, but we are looking, asking, enquiring, demanding to find out what is beauty. Not the form, not a woman or a man, or a small child that's extraordinarily beautiful - all children are. So what is beauty? I'm asking the question, sir, please answer it to yourself first. Or you've never thought about it. Not the beauty of a face but the beauty of a green lawn, of a flower, of the great mountains with the snow covering them, the deep valleys, the still tranquil waters of a river. All that is outside of you, and you say, 'How beautiful that is'. What does that word beauty mean? Because it is very important to find that out because we have so little beauty in our daily life. If you go through Benares you know all about it - the filthy streets, the dust, the lorries. Right? And you ask yourself, seeing all this, not the mere tenderness of a leaf, or the tender generosity of human beings, but to enquire very deeply, this word that is used by poets, painters, sculptors, and you are asking yourself now what is this quality of beauty? Do you want me to answer it or will you answer it? Go on, sir.
Question: You please answer it.
Krishnamurti: Why?
Q: Because we don't know.
K: That's it. The gentleman says, you answer it because we don't know. Why? Why don't you know? Why haven't we enquired into this enormous question? You have your own poets, from the ancient people to now. They write about it, they sing about it, they dance, and you say, 'I don't know what beauty is'. What a strange people we are. But if you ask what's your guru, who is your guru, who is your god - I believe there are 300,000 gods in India, pretty good! In Europe and America there is only one god. With you there are 300,000 more - you can choose any one of them to amuse yourself.
So what is beauty? It's the same question, sir, put in different words. What are you? What is the nature and the structure of you, apart from the biological factor. What are you? Pass some exams, get a degree, a job, a physicist, a scientist, a treasurer for a government - what are you? That is very closely related to what is beauty. When you look at a mountain, snow-capped, deep valleys, blue deep hills, what do you feel, what's your real response to all that? Don't you know? Aren't you for a second or a few minutes absolutely shocked by it? The greatness, the immensity, the blue valley, the extraordinary light, and the blue sky against the snow-clad mountains. What happens to you at that moment when you look at that - the grandeur, the majesty of those mountains - what do you feel? Do you for the moment, or for a few minutes, exist at all? You understand my question? Please don't agree, look at it very closely. At that moment when you look at something grand, immense, majestic, you for a second don't exist - right? - you've forgotten your worries, and your wife, and your children, your job, all the messiness of one's life. At that moment you say you are stunned by it, which is that for that second the grandeur has wiped all your memory, for a second, then you come back. What happens during that second? Go on, sir. What happens when you are not there? That is beauty. You understand? When you are not there. Don't agree, sir. Don't shake your head, yes.
So, there, the grandeur, the majesty of a mountain, or a lake, or that river early in the morning, making a golden path, for the second you have forgotten everything. That is when the self is not, there is beauty. You understand what I am saying? When you are not, with all your problems and responsibilities, your traditions and all that rubbish, not your family, then there is beauty. Right? When you are not there. Like a child with a toy, as long as the toy is complex and he plays with it, the toy absorbs him - right? - takes him over. The moment the toy is broken he is back to whatever he was doing. So we are like that. We are absorbed by the mountain. It's a toy for us for a second, or for a few minutes, and we go back to our world. And we are saying without a toy, nothing to absorb you, take you over. You understand what I'm saying? No? You know how a child behaves when you give him a toy, or haven't you watched? The toy becomes to the child extraordinary, he's amused, he plays with it. For a few minutes or a few hours or a few days the toy takes him over. Right? You understand? So the mountain has taken you over. Right? And can you without being absorbed by something great be free of yourself? You understand my question? You don't understand this. You are too clever. That's what's the matter with all of you - too much learning. You're not simple enough. If you are very simple - not in clothes - deeply simple in yourself, you will discover something extraordinary. But you are covered over with a lot of knowledge, experience, and so on.
So let's move. We are going to talk over together many things. We've talked over beauty for a while - not the poet's beauty, not the poem, the literature, the essays, the beautiful novel, or the good thrillers. Probably you don't read thrillers, do you? Or you are too holy. (Laughter) So let's look at ourselves. We have created the world - you, the speaker, his forefathers, past thousand years of generations and time. Right? So, what is all this about? You understand? You understand what I'm saying? What is all this noise about? Killing each other, maiming each other, dividing my god, your god. Why is this society so ugly, so brutal, so cruel? Yes, sir - why? Who has created this monstrous world? I'm not being pessimistic or optimistic, but look at the world. The thing that's going on outside of you. Poor countries buying armaments. Right? Your country buying armaments, and immense poverty, competition. Right? Who has created all this? Will you say god has created it? He must be a messy god. So, who created this society? And you are always talking about society. Who created, who put it together? Lord, you people... Haven't you put it together? Not you only - your fathers, your great grandfathers, the past generations of million years, they have created this society, through their avarice, envy. Right? Through their competition they have divided the world: economically, socially, religiously. Right? Face the facts, sir, for god's sake. You and the speaker and his fathers, and fathers back, back, back, and your fathers, as far as you can go, we have put this society together, we are responsible for it. Right? Or do you deny this fact?