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.
J. Krishnamurti/On Nature and the Environment, pp 84-85