Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

by Mahatma Gandhi

for the essence of religion is morality.

And he who would be friends with God must remain alone, or make the whole world his friend,

From a strictly ethical point of view, all these occasions must be regarded as moral lapses; for the carnal desire was there, and it was as good as the act. But from the ordinary point of view, a man who is saved from physically committing sin is regarded as saved. And I was saved only in that sense.

morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality.

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

My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words.

much show and little knowledge. I felt a crushing sense of my responsibility.

The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial-only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice.

I had always heard the merchants say that truth was not possible in business. I did not think so then, nor do I now.

and my mind became more and more occupied with the question as to how this state of things might be improved.

Because, I thought, only thus could we have some influence, and without influence it would not be possible to serve the community...I

We labour under a sort of superstition that the child has nothing to learn during the first five years of its life. On the contrary the fact is that the child never learns in after life what it does in its first five years. The education of the child begins with conception.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating.

He who realizes this will control his lust at any cost, equip himself with the knowledge necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of his progeny,

Before the vow I had been open to being overcome by temptation at any moment. Now the vow was a sure shield against temptation.

for the seeker who would live in fear of God and who would see Him face to face, restraint in diet both as to quantity and quality is as essential as restraint in thought and speech.

Truth is like a vast-tree, which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mine of truth the richer the discovery of the gems buried there, in the shape of openings for an ever greater variety of service.

Man and his deed are two distinct things. Whereas a good deed should call for approbation and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked, always deserves respect or pity as the case may be. ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.

For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.

and if it were a hostile critic’s cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up ‘the hollowness of many of my pretensions’.

nothing once begun should be abandoned unless it is proved to be morally wrong.

If the control is from without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be profitable only when exercised from within.

The useful and the useless must, like good and evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice.

A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast.

It dawned upon me that fasting could be made as powerful a weapon of indulgence as of restraint.

We are not ashamed to sacrifice a multitude of other lives in decorating the perishable body and trying to prolong its existence for a few fleeting moments, with the result that we kill ourselves, both body and soul.

Inhibitions imposed from without rarely succeed, but when they are self-imposed, they have a decidedly salutary effect.

fasting is futile unless it is accompanied by an incessant longing for self-restraint.

one of the means to the end of self-restraint, but it is not all, and if physical fasting is not accompanied by mental fasting, it is bound to end in hypocrisy and disaster.

And the exercise of the spirit entirely depended on the life and character of the teacher. The teacher had always to be mindful of his p’s and q’s, whether he was in the midst of his boys or not.

A cowardly teacher would never succeed in making his boys valiant, and a stranger to self-restraint could never teach his pupils the value of self-restraint.

I am afraid I exhibited before him that day not the spirit, but the brute, in me.

and that we could convert them by love.

To state that noble doctrine is simple enough; to know it and to practise it in the midst of a world full of strife, turmoil and passions is a task whose difficulty I realize more and more day by day. And yet the conviction too that without it life is not worth living is growing daily deeper.

Life is governed by a multitude of forces. It would be smooth sailing, if one could determine the course of one’s actions only by one general principle whose application at a given moment was too obvious to need even a moment’s reflection. But I cannot recall a single act which could be so easily determined.

It is not possible to make a person or society non-violent by compulsion.

I do not believe in the promotion of national or any other interest at the sacrifice of some other interest.

For me non-violence is not a mere philosophical principle. It is the rule and the breath of my life.

True guidance comes by constant waiting upon God, by utmost humility, self-abnegation, by being ever ready to sacrifice one’s self. Its practice requires fearlessness and courage of the highest order.

Not violence, not untruth but non-violence, Truth is the law of our being.

My services have many limitations, but God has up to now blessed them in spite of the imperfections.

For confessions of error is like a broom that sweeps away dirt and leaves the surface cleaner than before.

I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.

I have become literally sick of the adoration of the unthinking multitude.

I have no desire for prestige anywhere. It is furniture required in courts of kings. I am a servant of Mussulmans, Christians, Parsis and Jews as I am of Hindus. And a servant is in need of love, not prestige. That is assured to me so long as I remain a faithful servant.

The trouble with our votaries of ahimsa is that they have made of ahimsa a blind fetish and put the greatest obstacle in the way of the spread of true ahimsa in our midst.

if they want it and would take it, they do so not from any malicious motive, but they would do it because theirs was a greater need than mine.

possession seems to me to be a crime; I can only possess certain things when I know that others, who also want to possess similar things are able to do so.

this body also may be surrendered at the will of God, and while it is at my disposal, must be used not for dissipation, not for self-indulgence, not for pleasure, but merely for service and service the whole of your waking hours. And if this is true with reference to the body, how much more with reference to clothing and other things that we use?

when you dispossess yourself of everything you have, you really possess all the treasures of the138 world.