Book detail: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This anthology brings together a selection of Mahatma Gandhi's most significant writings, offering insights into his personal journey, his role in the Indian independence movement, and his enduring principles of non-violence and civil disobedience.
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“A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby -- not even money, certainly not my soul.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The spinning wheel means national consciousness and a contribution by every individual to a definite constructive national work.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“If we could all give our own definitions of God, there would be as many definitions as there are men and women.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“India's coming into her own will mean every nation doing likewise.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I do not want India to rise on the ruin of other nations.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Man the law-giver will have to pay a dreadful penalty for the degradation he has imposed upon the so called weaker sex.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“It is my firm faith that man is by nature going higher.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I regard Duryodhana and his party as the baser impulses in man, and Arjuna and his party as the higher impulses.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The movement of nonviolent non-co-operation has nothing in common with the historical struggles for freedom in the West.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Our aim is not to do things by violence to opponents.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The present war is the saturation point in violence. It spells, to my mind, also its doom.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I love Christianity, Islam and many other faiths - through Hinduism.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Life is one indivisible whole.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The golden rule to apply in all such cases is resolutely to refuse to have what millions cannot.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong, but of the weak.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The more efficient a force is, the more silent and the more subtle it is.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I believe in trusting. Trust begets trust. Suspicion is foetid and only stinks. He who trusts has never yet lost in the world.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“A pacifism which can see the cruelties only of occasional military warfare and is blind to the continuous cruelties of our social system is worthless.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“How can one be compelled to accept slavery? I simply refuse to do the master's bidding. He may torture me, break my bones to atoms and even kill me. He will then have my dead body, not my obedience. Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“We have no evidence whatsoever that the soul perishes with the body.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Even a single lamp dispels the deepest darkness.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Truthful movements spontaneously attract to themselves all manner of pure and disinterested help.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Happiness, the goal to which we all are striving is reached by endeavoring to make the lives of others happy, and if by renouncing the luxuries of life we can lighten the burdens of others.... surely the simplification of our wants is a thing greatly to be desired! And so, if instead of supposing that we must become hermits and dwellers in caves in order to practice simplicity, we set about simplifying our affairs, each according to his own convictions and opportunity, much good will result and the simple life will at once be established.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three months' stay in England and Europe that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection you would have ten-fold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“We are the makers of our own state and...individuals who realize the fact need not, ought not, to wait for collective action.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Is the God of the Mahometan different from the God of the Hindu? Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal? Wherein is the cause for quarreling?”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I came to the conclusion long ago . . . that all religions were true, and also that all had some error in them.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“The hardest heart and the grossest ignorance must disappear before the rising sun of suffering without anger and without malice.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I well remember how the thoughts I had up to the time of my discharge from the jail on every occasion were modified immediately after discharge, and after getting first-hand information myself. Somehow or other the jail atmosphere does not allow you to have all the bearings in your mind.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“I own no enemy on earth. That is my creed.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“But success and failure are of no account. They are God's concern, not mine.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“A jailer is as much a prisoner as his prisoner.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Man does not live by bread alone. Many prefer self-respect to food.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
“Few men are wantonly wicked.”
Source: The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas