“Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Context: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.

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Jiddu Krishnamurti 233

Indian spiritual philosopher 1895–1986

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

The Eagle's Gift, (1981)

“We are confused and bemused, and think that it’s a momentary delusion that will soon dissipate, leaving our lives to continue as they were.”

David Cronenberg (1943) Canadian film director, screenwriter and actor

"The Beetle and the Fly," http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/17/the-beetle-and-the-fly/ (January 17, 2014)

“Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.”

Calvin Coolidge book The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

Source: The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

“If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 29
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.”

Joshua Ferris (1974) American author

“We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all thought, for thought and feeling dissipate energy.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

They are repetitive, producing mechanical activities which are a necessary part of existence. But they are only part, and thought and feeling cannot possibly enter into the immensity of life. Quite a different approach is necessary, not the path of habit, association and the known; there must be freedom from these. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. It cannot be done by thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes, and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness.
Source: 1970s, Meditations (1979), p. 105

“Do any deserve liberty who are not ready to give it to others? Let us calmly go to work, instead of dissipating our energy in unnecessary fretting and fuming.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

“Too many of us dissipate our energy by being "for all good causes," attending meetings and passing resolutions, organizing and presenting petitions — all this effort to change others, when if we really got down to it we could use this energy to change ourselves… We become tired radicals because we use our weakest weapon: the ballot box, where we are always outnumbered, and refuse to use our strongest weapon: spiritual power.”

Ammon Hennacy (1893–1970) American Christian radical

The Book of Ammon

“Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions.”

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