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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
Contents |
Truth |
Labour |
Faith |
Non-violence |
Satyagraha |
Swadeshi |
Fearlessness |
Sarvodaya |
Trusteeship |
Brahmacharya |
Non-possession |
Religion |
Freedom & Democracy |
Brotherhood |
Quotes on Gandhiji |
Truth |
It is because we have at the present moment everybody claiming the right of conscience without going through any discipline whatsoever, and there is so much untruth being delivered to a bewildered world. All that I can in true humility present to you is that Truth is not to be found by anybody who has not got an abundant sense of humility. If you would swim on the bosom of the ocean of Truth, you must reduce yourself to a zero.
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.
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Fearlessness |
Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral. Where there is fear there is no religion.
Fearlessness connotes freedom from all external fear -- fear of disease, bodily injury or death, of dispossession, of losing one's nearest and dearest, of losing reputation or giving offence, and so on.
We have two choices before us. We can become a great military power or, if we follow my way, we can become a great non-violent and invincible power. In either case the first condition is the shedding of fearlessness.
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Faith |
Without faith this world would come to naught in a moment. True faith is appropriation of the reasoned experience of people whom we believe to have lived a life purified by the prayer and penance. Belief, therefore, in prophets or incarnations who have lived in remote ages is not an idle superstition but a satisfaction of an inmost spiritual want.
All faiths are imperfect, liable to error. True knowledge of religion alone would break down the barriers between faith and faith.
Untruthfulness, uncharitableness, violence, sensuality -- all these things are strangers to faith. The Bhagavad Gita proclaims it in almost every verse. If I am to sum up the teachings of Sermon of Mount, I find the same answer. My reading of the Quran has led me to the same compulsion.
Faith is not a delicate flower which would under the slightest stormy weather. Faith is like the Himalaya mountains which cannot possibly change. No storm can possibly remove the Himalaya mountains from their foundations.... And I want every one of you to cultivate that faith in God and religion.
I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified my self with the whole of mankind, and I could not do unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of man's activities today constitutes an indivisible whole. You cannot divide social, economic, political and purely religious work into watertight compartments. I do not know any religion apart from human activity. It provides a moral basis to all other activities which they would otherwise lack, reducing life to a maze of 'sound and fury signifying nothing'.
I believe in the fundamental truth of all religions of the world. I believe that they are all God-given, and I believe that they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that, if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoint of the followers of those faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.
I do believe that in the other world there are neither Hindus, nor Christians nor Mussalmans. There all are judged not according to their labels, or professions, but according to their actions, irrespective of their professions.
There are subjects where Reason cannot take us far and we have to accept things on faith. Faith then does not contradict Reason but transcends it. Faith is a kind of sixth sense which works in cases which are without the purview of Reason.
This earthly existence of ours is more brittle than the glass bangles that ladies wear....Therefore, while we have yet breathing time, let us get rid of the distinctions of high and low, purify our hearts and be ready to face our Maker when an earthquake or some natural calamity or death in the ordinary course overtakes us.
No act of mine is done without prayer. Man is a fallible being. He can never be sure of his steps. What he may regard as answer to prayer may be an echo of his pride. For infallible guidance man has to have a perfectly innocent heart incapable of evil.
Prayer has been the saving of my life. Without it I should have been lunatic long ago.
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Non-violence |
It is the acid test of non-violence that in a non-violent conflict there is no rancour left behind and in the end the enemies are converted into friends.
Non-violence is the highest idea. It is meant for the brave, never for the cowardly. Non-violence is the eradication of the desire to injure or to kill.
Non-violence is the highest duty. Even if we cannot practise it in full we must try to understand its spirit nad refrain as far as humanly possible from violence.
Non-violence means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for suffering.
True non-violence should mean a complete freedom from ill will and anger and hate and an overflowing love for all.
Non-violence and truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them.
The removal of untouchability is one of the highest expressions of non-violence.
Non-violence magnifies one's defects, and minimises those of the opponent. It regards the mole in one's own eye as a beam and the beam un the opponent's eye as a mole.
Non-violence must express itself through the acts of selfless service of the masses.
Non-violence or non-injury a comprehensive virtue and the ideal of action in human relationships.
Truth is my religion and non-violence is only its realisation.
Non-violence is reverence for all life.
True non-violence means a smile even on the death-bed brought about by an assailant. It is only with that non-violence that we can befriend our opponents and win their love.
Woman is more fitted than man to make explorations and take bolder action in non-violence.
A votary of non-violence must cultivate a habit of unremitting toil, sleepless vigilence, ceaseless self-control.
It is against the spirit of non-violence to overawe even one person into submission.
Love, otherwise non-violence, sustains this planet of ours.
Man can live freely by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.
The scriptures of Christians, Mussalmans, and Hindus are all replete with the teaching of non-violence.
Perfect non-violence is impossible, so long as we exist physically... Perfect non-violence, whilst you are inhabiting the body, is only a theory like Euclid's point or straight line, but we have to endeavour every moment of our lives.
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Brahmacharya |
The Brahmachari of my conception will be healthy and will be healthy and will easily live long. He will not even suffer from so much as a headache. Mental and physical work will not cause fatigue. He is ever bright, never slothful. Outward neatness will be an exact reflection of the inner. He will exhibit all the attributes of the steadfast one described in the Gita. It indeed cause no worry if one person is met with answering the description.
Life without brahmacharya appears to me to be insipid and animal-like. The brute by nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises, self-restraint. What formerly appeared to me to be extravagant praise of brahmacharya in our religious books seems now, with increasing clearness every day, to be absolutely proper and founded on experience.
Brahmacharya means the control of the senses in thought, word and deed.
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Labour |
...There is a world-wide conflict between capital and labour, and the poor envy the rich. If all worked for their bread, distinctions of rank would be obliterated; the rich would still be there, but they would deem themselves only trustees of their property, and would use it mainly in the public interest.
Every man has an equal right to the necessaries of life even as birds and beasts have. And since every right carries with it a corresponding duty and the corresponding remedy for resisting any attack upon it. It is merely a matter of finding out the corresponding duties and remedies to vindicate the elementary fundamental equality. The corresponding duty is to labour with my limbs and the corresponding remedy is to non-cooperate with him who deprives me of fruit of my labour.
The entire idea behind bread labour really means the recognition of the necessity of some physical exertion even for mental workers, so that they may be performing some productive function in a spirit of service to the community.
Obedience to the law of bread labour will bring about a silent revolution in the structure of society. Men's triumph will consist in substituting the struggle for existence by the struggle for mutual service. The law of the brute will be replaced by the law of man.
I have indeed wept to see the stark poverty and unemployment in our country, but I must confess our own negligence and ignorance are largely responsible for it. We do not know the dignity of labour as such. Thus, a shoemaker will not do anything beyond making his shoes, he will think that all other labour is below his dignity. That wrong notion must go.
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Satyagraha |
The fight of Satyagraha is for the strong in spirit, not the doubter or the timid. Satyagraha teaches us the art of living as well as dying. Birth and death are inevitable among mortals. What distinguishes the man from the brute is his conscious striving to realize the spirit within.
Satyagraha is a relentless search for truth and a determination to reach truth.
Satyagraha is gentle, it never wounds. It must not be the result of anger or malice. It is never fussy, never impatient, never vociferous. It is the direct opposite of compulsion. It is a complete substitute for violence.
Passive resistance is an all-sided sword; it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood it produces far-reaching results. It never rusts and cannot be stolen.
I am quite sure that the stoniest heart will be melted by passive resistance....This is a sovereign and most effective remedy...It is a weapon of the purest type. It is not a weapon of the weak. It needs far greater courage to be passive resister than physical resister.
It is courage of Jesus, a Daniel, a Cranmer, a Latimer and a Ridley who could go calmly to suffering and death, and the courage of a Tolstoy who dared to defy the Czars of Russia, that stands out as the greatest.
Indeed, one perfect resister is enough to win the battle of Right against the Wrong.
I consider non-cooperation to be such a powerful and pure instrument that, if it is enforced in an earnest spirit, it will be like seeking first the Kingdom of God and everything else following as a matter of course. People will then have realized their true power. They would have learnt the value of discipline, self-control, joint action, non-violence, organization and everything else that goes to make a nation great and good, and not merely great.
My experience has taught me that the law of progression applies to every righteous struggle. But in the case of Satyagraha the law amounts to an axiom. As a Satyagraha struggle progresses onward, there is a constant growth in the results to which it leads... In Satyagraha the minimum is maximum. And is the irreducible minimum, there is no question of retreat, and the only movement possible is an advance.
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Non-possession |
It is open to the world...to laugh at my dispossessing myself of all property. For me the dispossession has been a positive gain. I would like people to compete with me in my contentment. It is the richest treasure I own. Hence it is perhaps right to say that, though I preach poverty, I am a rich man!
If each retained possession of only what he needed, no one would be in want, and all would live in contentment. As it is, the rich are discontented no less than the poor. The poor man would fain become a millionaire, and the millionaire a multi-millionaire.
The rich should take the initiative in dispossession with a view to a universal diffusion of the spirit of contentment. If only they keep their own property within moderate limits, the starving will be easily fed, and will learn the lesson of contentment along with the rich.
Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment, and increase the capacity for service.
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Religion |
In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals
Religions are different roads converging upon the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal?
I believe in the fundamental truth of all religions of the world. I believe that they are all God-given, and I believe that they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that, if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoint of the followers of those faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.
There is nothing in the world that would keep me from professing Christianity or any other faith, the moment I felt the truth of and the need of it. Where there is a fear, there is no religion.... If I could call myself, say, a Christian, or a Mussalman, without my own interpretation of the Bible or Koran, I should not hesitate to call myself either. For then Hindu, Christian and Mussalman world be synonymous terms. I do believe that in the other world there are neither Hindus, nor Christians nor Mussalmans. There all are judged not according to their labels, or professions, but according to their actions, irrespective of their professions. During our earthly existence there will always be these labels. I therefore prefer to retain label of my forefathers so long as it does not cramp my growth and does not debar me from assimilating all that is good anywhere else.
Religions are not for separating men from one another, they are meant to bind them.
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Freedom & Democracy |
True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the Centre. It has to be worked from below by the people of every village.
Self-government means continuous effort to be independent of government or whether it is national. Swaraj government will be a sorry affair if people look up to it for the regulation of every detail of life.
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Quotes on Gandhiji |
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