My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi

by Mahatma Gandhi

“Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.”

jealousy does not wait for reasons.

good handwriting is a necessary part of education.

True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world.

man takes in vice far more readily than virtue.

A convert’s enthusiasm for his new religion is greater than that of a person who is born in it.

Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man and silence is necessary in order to surmount it.

A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word.

Great men never look at a person’s exterior. They think of his heart.”

Many a youth, innocent at first, must have been drawn into sin by a false sense of shame.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.

My experience has shown me that we win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.

‘Renunciation without aversion is not lasting.’

It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution.

How heavy is the toll of sins and wrongs that wealth, power and prestige exact from man!

The law of karma is inexorable and impossible of evasion.

The brute by nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in-so-far as he exercises, self-restraint.

all training without culture of the spirit was of no use, and might be even harmful.

Children wrapped up in cotton wool are not always proof against all temptation or contamination.

Man cannot for a moment live without consciously or unconsciously committing outward himsa. The very fact of his living—eating, drinking and moving about—necessarily involves some himsa, destruction of life, be it ever so minute.

Have I not told you times without number that ultimately a deceiver only deceives himself?”

humility would cease to be humility the moment it became a matter of vow. The true connotation of humility is self-effacement.

Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.