Gandhi's Life in His Own Words Quotes

“The mahatma I leave to his fate. Though a non-co-operator I shall gladly subscribe to a Bill to make it criminal for anybody to call me mahatma and to touch my feet. Where I can impose the law myself, at the ashram, the practice is criminal.126”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“I firmly believe that freedom won through bloodshed or fraud is no freedom.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“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.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“I have faith that in time to come, India will pit that against the threat of destruction which the world has invited upon itself by the discovery of the atom bomb.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“Gita is worshipped not by a parrot-like recitation but by following its teaching.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve, what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“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.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“I have passed through many an ordeal in my life. But perhaps this is to be the hardest. I like it. The fiercer it becomes, the closer is the communion with God that I experience and the deeper grows my faith in His abundant grace. So long as it persists, I know it is well with me.158”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“Language at best is but a poor vehicle for expressing one’s thoughts in full. For me non-violence is not a mere philosophical principle. It is the rule and the breath of my life. I know I fail often, sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously. It is a matter not of the intellect but of the heart.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“story short, my return to India found me in no time one with India’s women. The easy access I had to their hearts was an agreeable revelation to me. Muslim sisters never kept purdah before me here, even as they did not in South Africa. I sleep in the ashram surrounded by women, for they feel safe with me in every respect. It should be remembered that there is no privacy in the Segaon Ashram.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“You have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished me through his essay on the ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience’ scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa. Great Britain gave me Ruskin, whose Unto This Last transformed me overnight from a lawyer and city dweller into a rustic living away from Durban on a farm, three miles from the nearest railway station; and Russia gave me in Tolstoy a teacher who furnished a reasoned basis for my non-violence.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth. And if every page of these chapters does not proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of Truth is ahimsa, I shall deem all my labour in writing these chapters to have been in vain. And, even though my efforts in this behalf may prove fruitless, let the readers know that the vehicle, not the great principle, is at fault.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“I do not want to bring anyone to book. I am sure that, when the truth becomes known, they will be sorry for their conduct.’75”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.66”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“But I can see today that we feel all the freer and lighter for having cast off the tinsel of ‘civilization’.70”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world. Only between like natures can friendship be altogether worthy and enduring. Friends react on one another. Hence in friendship there is very little scope for reform.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“But one thing took deep root in me—the conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality. Truth became my sole objective. It began to grow in magnitude every day, and my definition of it also has been ever widening.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words

“True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world. Only between like natures can friendship be altogether worthy and enduring.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Life in His Own Words