Do you understand what simple love is ? Not the complexity of sexual love, nor the love of God, but just love, being tender, really gentle in one’s whole approach to all things. … But how is there to come into being this sensitivity which makes you alert not do do any harm to people, to animals, to flowers? Are you interested in all this? You should be. If you are not interested in being sensitive, you might as well be dead – and most people are. Though they eat three meals a day, have jobs, procreate children, drive cars, wear fine clothes, most people are as good as dead.
Do you know what it means to be sensitive? It means surely to have tender feelings for things…To be sensitive is to feel for people, for birds, for flowers, for trees – not because they are yours, but just because you are awake to the extraordinary beauty of things. …The moment you are deeply sensitive you naturally do not pluck the flowers; there is a spontaneous desire not to destroy things, not to hurt people, which means having real respect, love. To love is the most important thing in life. But what do we mean by love? When you love someone because that person loves you in return, surely that is not love. To love is to have this extraordinary feeling of affection without asking anything in return.
from Krishnamurti’s “Think on These Things”, a series of essays originally published in 1964