Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

Civil disobedience is the inherent right of a citizen.

For me the only certain means of knowing God is nonviolence, ahimsa, love.

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

The true battlefield is within.

God of Truth and Justice can never create distinctions of high and low among His own children.

True art must be evidence of happiness, contentment and purity of its authors.

Bravery on the battlefield is impossible for us. Bravery of the soul still remains open to us.

It was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it.

I claim to be no more than an average man with below average capabilities.

What is imprisonment to the man who is fearless of death itself?

There is no "playing with truth" in the Charkha programme, for satyagraha is not predominantly civil disobedience but a quiet and irresistible pursuit of Truth.

Human dignity demands courage to defend oneself.

A definite forgiveness would mean a definite recognition of our strength.

What will tell in the end will be character and not a knowledge of letters.

The aim of university education should be to turn out true servants of the people who will live and die for the country's freedom.

The very first step in nonviolence is that we cultivate in our daily life, as between ourselves, truthfulness, humility, tolerance, loving kindness.

Man becomes not the lord and master of all creation but he is its servant.

Love and exclusive possession can never go together.

Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid. The Valiant in spirit glory in fighting alone.

But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

God comes to the hungry in the form of food.

Newspapers should be read for the study of facts. They should not be allowed to kill the habit of independent thinking.

Mother cow is in many ways better than the mother who gave us birth.

A duty religiously performed carries with it several other important consequences.

I have nothing of the communalist in me because my Hinduism is all inclusive.

Disobedience that is wholly civil should never provoke retaliation.

A national spirit is necessary for national existence. A flag is a material aid to the development of such a spirit.

The chains of a slave are broken the moment he considers himself a free man.

The lives of Zoroaster, Jesus and Mohammed, as I have understood them, have illumined many a passage in the Gita.

Cow preservation is an article of faith in Hinduism.

There being no absolute and universal standard of right, terrorism must be held to be wrong in every case.

That nation is great which rests its head upon death as its pillow.

Man is the center of a circle without a circumference, except the one he creates for himself.

God cannot be realized through intellect.

Do not believe in telling people of one's faith, especially with a view to conversion. Faith must be lived, and when it is, it becomes self-propagating

Absolute calm is not the law of ocean. And it is the same with the ocean of life.

Surely, conversion is a matter between man and his Maker who alone knows His creatures' hearts.

Truth, purity, self-control, firmness, fearlessness, humility, unity, peace, and renunciation - these are the inherent qualities of a civil resister.

An institution that suffers from a plethora of leaders is surely in a bad way.

I do not accept the orthodox teaching that Jesus was or is God incarnate in the accepted sense or that he was or is the only Son of God.

The Gita is not for those who have no faith.

Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.

When freedom is in jeopardy, non-co-operation may be a duty and prison may be a palace.

My anekantavada is the result of the twin doctrines of satya and ahimsa.

I look upon air-power for destruction as a terrible crime against humanity.

One who hooks his fortune to ahimsa, the law of love, daily lessens the circle of destruction and to that extent promotes life and love.

Buddha emphasized and re-declared the eternal and unalterable existence of the moral government of this universe. He unhesitatingly said that the law was God Himself.

I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all.

Why should men arrogate to themselves the right to regulate female purity?

If a man voluntarily allows himself to be crushed, he yields the oil of moral energy which sustains the world.