Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948) was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer and perfector of Satyagraha - resistance through mass civil disobedience strongly founded upon ahimsa (total non-violence). Gandhi is commonly known and addressed in India and across the world as Mahatma Gandhi (from Sanskrit, Mahatma: Great Soul) and as Bapu (in many Indian languages, Father).
113 Quotes (Page 1 of 2)
Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it.
— Mahatma Gandhi
A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.
— Mahatma Gandhi
If you don't ask, you don't get.
— Mahatma Gandhi
A No uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a Yes merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Truth never damages a cause that is just.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Be the change you want to see in the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
We must become the change we want to see.
— Mahatma Gandhi
If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.
— Mahatma Gandhi
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The control of the palate is a valuable aid for the control of the mind.
— Mahatma Gandhi
You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Fear has its use but cowardice has none.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Cowards can never be moral.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
— Mahatma Gandhi
No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.
— Mahatma Gandhi
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Faith must be enforced by reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Non-violence is the article of faith.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I claim to be an average man of less than average ability. 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
God comes to the hungry in the form of food.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave. His fetters fall... freedom and slavery are mental states.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The good man is the friend of all living things.
— Mahatma Gandhi
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The mantram becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Hatred can be overcome only by love.
— Mahatma Gandhi
To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.
— Mahatma Gandhi
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
— Mahatma Gandhi
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves.
— Mahatma Gandhi
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.
— Mahatma Gandhi
A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.
— Mahatma Gandhi
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.
— Mahatma Gandhi
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
— Mahatma Gandhi
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
— Mahatma Gandhi
My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Where there is love there is life.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupation is exhilarating and life giving.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Patience means self-suffering.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.
— Mahatma Gandhi
A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Poverty is the worst form of violence.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Prayer is a confession of one's own unworthiness and weakness.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Let everyone try and find that as a result of daily prayer he adds something new to his life, something with which nothing can be compared.
— Mahatma Gandhi
What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
— Mahatma Gandhi
It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason.
— Mahatma Gandhi
All business depends upon men fulfilling their responsibilities.
— Mahatma Gandhi
There are limits to self-indulgence, none to restraint.
— Mahatma Gandhi
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Not to have control over the senses is like sailing in a rudderless ship, bound to break to pieces on coming in contact with the very first rock.
— Mahatma Gandhi
They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large.
— Mahatma Gandhi
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Ahimsa is the attribute of the soul, and therefore, to be practiced by everybody in all affairs of life. If it cannot be practiced in all departments, it has no practical value.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Those who know how to think need no teachers.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one's opponent.
— Mahatma Gandhi
There is no god higher than truth.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.
— Mahatma Gandhi
A vow is fixed and unalterable determination to do a thing, when such a determination is related to something noble which can only uplift the man who makes the resolve.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Your capacity to keep your vow will depend on the purity of your life.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Personally, I hold that a man, who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it, forfeits his manhood.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Morality is contraband in war.
— Mahatma Gandhi
It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
— Mahatma Gandhi