Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
Search Quotes Search Sages Search Chapters

Mahatma Gandhi

1869 – 1948 CE

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)

Leader of India’s independence movement, non-violent civil disobedience advocate, major inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela; Gandhi followed in his Jain tradition of fasting, meditation and vegetarianism. After an arranged marriage at 13, he studied law in England but was so introverted and shy, he froze during his first cross-examination and couldn’t say anything. Not being able to find work in India, he moved to South Africa where in a Rosa-Parks type moment was thrown off a train for refusing to move to the back. This led to his lifetime passion for fighting prejudice, discrimination, and injustice – political change in S. Africa, Indian independence, and many attempts to establish peace between Hindus and Muslims.

Eras

Unlisted Sources

Letter to Hitler (1940)​

Non-Violence in Peaace and War (1948)

Non-Violence in Peac(1948)

Quotes by Mahatma Gandhi (28 quotes)

“For me whatever is in the atoms and molecules is in the universe. I believe in the saying that what is in the microcosm of one’s self is reflected in the macrocosm.”

Chapters: 4. The Father of All Things

Comments: Click to comment

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

Comments: Click to comment

“Those who cannot renounce attachment to the results of their work are far from the path.”

Chapters: 57. Wu Wei

Comments: Click to comment

“To lose patience is to lose the battle.”

Themes: Patience

Comments: Click to comment

“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world… as in being able to remake ourselves.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

Comments: Click to comment

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”

Themes: Problems

Comments: Click to comment

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.”

Themes: Mind

Comments: Click to comment

“Reporter: Mr. Gandhi! What do you think of Western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.”

Themes: Civilization

Comments: Click to comment

“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.”

Themes: Truth

Comments: Click to comment

“An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.”

Themes: Golden Rule

Comments: Click to comment

“The enemy is fear. We think it is hate but it is fear.”

Themes: Fear Hate Enemy

Comments: Click to comment

“If I were asked to define the Hindu creed, I should simply say: Search after truth through non-violent means. A man may not believe in God and still call himself a Hindu. Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after truth... Hinduism is the religion of truth. Truth is God. Denial of God we have known. Denial of truth we have not known.”

Themes: Hinduism God

Comments: Click to comment

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

Comments: Click to comment

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

Themes: Leadership

Comments: Click to comment

“Let us have production by the masses rather than mass production.”

Themes: Livelihood

Comments: Click to comment

“We should forget our anger before we lie down to sleep.”

Themes: Anger

Comments: Click to comment

“One of my sons accused me of being a follower of Buddha... I feel even proud of being accused of being a follower of the Buddha... I owe a great deal to the inspiration that I have derived from the life of the Enlightened One. There is the imprint of Buddhistic influence on the whole of Asia,... it has to re-learn the message of the Buddha and deliver it to the whole world. His love, his boundless love went out as much to the lower animal, to the lowest life as to human beings. And he insisted upon purity of life.”

Comments: Click to comment

“A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”

Comments: Click to comment

“It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. what is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.”

from Non-Violence in Peaace and War (1948)

Comments: Click to comment

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”

Comments: Click to comment

“If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”

Comments: Click to comment

“In the end deceivers deceive only themselves.”

Themes: Lies Deception

Comments: Click to comment

“If we take care of the means, we are bound to reach the end sooner or later. When once we have grasped this point, final victory is beyond question.”

Comments: Click to comment

“I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity... The rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls... You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud.”

from Letter to Hitler (1940)​

Themes: Evil

Comments: Click to comment

“The most awful tyranny is the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinner will have been wiped out.”

from Non-Violence in Peac(1948)

Comments: Click to comment

“I am always true from my point of view, and am often wrong from the point of view of my honest critics. I know that we are both right from our respective points of view. And this knowledge saves me from attributing motives to my opponents or critics.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Friendship that insists upon agreement on all matters is not worth the name. Friendship to be real must ever sustain the weight of honest differences, however sharp they be.”

Themes: Friendship

Comments: Click to comment

Quotes about Mahatma Gandhi (8 quotes)

“Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice... One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking... regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”

George Orwell 1903 – 1950 CE
English, poet, humanist, apostle of doubt, and powerful political influence
from Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

Comments: Click to comment

“I think that Gandhi's way, a methodless method, acting with a non-winning, non-opposing state of mind, is akin to natural farming.”

Masanobu Fukuoka 福岡 正信 1913 – 2008 CE
from One Straw Revolution

Themes: Competition

Comments: Click to comment

“Gandhi not only spoke against the caste system he acted against it. He took 'untouchables' by the hand and led them into the temples from which they had been excluded. To equal that, President Eisenhower would have taken a Negro child by the hand and led her into Central High School in Little Rock.”

Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968 CE
Leading world influence for equality, peace, non-violence, and poverty alleviation

Comments: Click to comment

“Gandhi's reading of the Vedas caused him to envision independent India as a collection of self-sufficient agrarian communities, each spinning its own khadi cloth, exporting little and importing even less... Yet this Arcadian vision was simply incompatible with the realities of modern economics, and for that reason not much has remained of it save for Gandhi's radiant image on billion of rupee notes.”

Yuval Harari יובל נח הררי‎ 1976 CE –
Israeli historian, professor, and philosopher

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Comments: Click to comment

“To many, including Winston Churchill, the British Empire was a great force for good. To an unprepossessing Indian lawyer, the British Empire, which saw itself as the bastion of liberty, was evil, for it rested on a lie. It denied to many of its subjects the very equality that was the essence of freedom... Strong in the truth, he used moral power to bring a great power to its knees. Gandhi focuses on his entire life as a search for truth, teaching us that there are many roads to wisdom and many ways to fight the battles of life.”

J. Rufus Fears 1945 – 2012 CE
from Books That Made History

Comments: Click to comment

“From Emerson to Thoreau to Gandhi to MLK to Mandela. One idea in many forms, passed along from one giant to another. Perhaps the greatest relay race in the history of inspiration...It's the lineage of an idea that has evolved and been adapted for two centuries.”

Deepak Malhotra 1
"Professor of the Year"

from Peacemaker's Code

Comments: Click to comment

“The vision that drew Gandhi was of a people content with the simplicity of ancient ways. Like most visions this was not realistic... After Gandhi's assassination, his movement against industrialization was rapidly eroded by the natural acquisitiveness and competitive spirit of men.”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Heroes of History

Comments: Click to comment

“Mahatma Gandhi's approach... Instead of developing richness, develop some kind of poverty... he hoped that the whole citizenry of India would become practically yogis, ascetics. But if you run a country, you can't have that approach... Just chanting and bowing all the time and simplifying the whole situation does not work... Somebody has to relate with wealth. Otherwise there will be a lot of monks and nuns who starve to death... Actually, I respect him a lot, his idea of nonviolence. That idea was very successful, but in the end it produced tremendous aggression.”

Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE

Comments: Click to comment

Comments (0)

Log in to comment.