Mahatma Gandhi Men Quotations [Page 2]

Man cannot be transformed from bad to good overnight.

It is for you and me to show that no vice is inherent in man.

I must refuse to believe that the Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man's inhuman ingenuity.

My own opinion is that just as fundamentally man and woman are one, their problems must be one in essence.

The Swaraj of my dream is the poor man's Swaraj.

It is my firm faith that man is by nature going higher.

I believe in advaita, I believe in the essential unity of man and for that matter of all that lives.

If Euclid's point, though incapable of being drawn by any human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live.

I believe in conversion of mankind, not its destruction.

I hold no man to be indispensable for the welfare of the country.

I cannot picture to myself a time when all mankind will have one religion.

I regard Duryodhana and his party as the baser impulses in man, and Arjuna and his party as the higher impulses.

I have discovered that man is superior to the system he propounds.

If I am true to myself, if I am true to mankind, if I am true to humanity, I must understand all the faults that human flesh is heir to.

A man like me cannot but believe that this earthquake is a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins.

Mankind is one, seeing that all are equally subject to the moral law. All men are equal in God's eyes.

Some form of common worship and a common place of worship appear to be a human necessity.

Every man has an equal right to the necessaries of life even as birds and beasts have.

A selfish basis would not serve the purpose of taking a man higher and higher along the paths of evolution.

All the great religions of the world inculcate equality and brotherhood of mankind and the virtue of toleration.

A man who wants to control his animal passions easily does so if he controls his palate.

No two men are absolutely alike, not even twins, yet there is much that is indispensably common to all mankind.

Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence.

Human dignity demands courage to defend oneself.

A man's true wealth hereafter is the good he has done to his fellowmen.

The fact that mankind persists shows that the cohesive force is greater than the disruptive force, centripetal force greater than centrifugal.

That which makes man the mere plaything of fate is God.

If it is man's privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be inter - dependent.

A man of truth must ever be confident, if he has also equal need to be diffident.

Man, through the cow, is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives.

Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways.

That which is inherent in man is his virtue.

Men are good. But they are poor victims making themselves miserable under the false belief that they are doing good.

The woman has circumvented man in a variety of ways in her unconsciously subtle ways, as the man has vainly and equally consciously struggled to thwart the woman in gaining ascendancy over him.

It is degrading both for man and woman that woman should be called upon or induced to forsake the hearth and shoulder the rifle for the protection of that hearth.

The most practical, the most dignified way of going on in the world is to take people at their word, when you have no positive reason to the contrary.

Ahimsa is nothing if not a well-balanced, exquisite consideration for one's neighbour, and an idle man is wanting in that elementary consideration.

Cow-slaughter and man-slaughter are in my opinion two sides of the same coin.

Nonviolence, applied to very large masses of mankind, is a new experiment in the history of the world.

Do not flatter yourselves with the belief that a mere recital of that celebrated verse in St. John makes a man a Christian.

If treachery is the reward of trust, will the man who trusts come to harm?

All great religions have rightly regarded kama as the arch-enemy of man, anger or hatred coming only in the second place.

He who runs may see that opium and such other intoxicants and narcotics stupefy a man's soul and reduce him to a level lower than that of beasts.

Repression does for a true man or a nation what fire does for gold.

We are all very imperfect and weak things, and if we are to destroy all whose ways we do not like, there will be not a man left alive.

The field of research in the doctrine of civil resistance is necessarily limited, as the occasions for civil resistance in a man's life must not be frequent.

Every species, human and subhuman, has some distinguishing mark, so that you can tell a man from a beast, or a dog from a cow.

No one should dogmatize about the capacity of human nature for degradation or exaltation.

Study men laying down their lives without hurting anyone else in the cause of their country's freedom.

We burn the evil men do with their mortal remains. We treasure the memory of the good they do, and distance magnifies it.

In a plan of life based on nonviolence, woman has as much right to shape her own destiny as man has to shape his.

The man or the woman who can display the nonviolence of the brave can easily stand against as external invasion.

Truth and nonviolence are both the means and the end, and given the right type of men, the legislatures can be the means of achieving the concrete pursuit of truth and nonviolence.

When a man vowed to nonviolence as the law governing human beings dares to refer to war, he can only do it so as to strain every nerve to avoid it.

I can no more preach nonviolence to a cowardly man than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy scenes.

Himsa does not need to be taught, Man as animal is violent, but as spirit is nonviolent.

A truly nonviolent man would never live to tell the tale of atrocities. He would have laid down his life on the spot in non-violent resistance.

For a nonviolent struggle, there is no age limit. The blind, the maimed and the bed-ridden may serve, and not only men but women also.

It is difficult for me to regard anyone who obeys no moral principle in his conduct to be a religious man.

A man of prayer regards what are known as physical calamities as divine chastisement.

I should wish to die if a man who is impure should parade his purity in front of me.

Religion is no test of nationality, but a personal matter between man and his God.

No religion taught man to kill fellowmen because he held different opinions or was of another religion.

What distinguishes man from the brute is his conscious striving to realise the spirit within.

We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor.... Millions will always remain poor.

Man has the supreme knack of deceiving himself; the Englishman is supremest among men.

Woman is more fitted than man to make explorations and take bolder action in ahimsa.

Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something,it makes me incapable of doing it. When I believe I can,I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.’"Mahatma Gandhi

Cowardice is impotence worse than violence. The coward desires revenge but being afraid to die, he looks to others, maybe to the government of the day, to do the work of defense for him. A coward is less than a man. He does not deserve to be a member of a society of men and women.

I refuse to believe that the tendency of human nature is always downward.

Study men following the law of their higher nature, the law of love, so that when you grow to manhood, you will have improved your heritage.

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?

Man's upward progress means ever increasing difficulty, which is to be welcomed.

I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else. ... Nature produces enough for our wants from day to day, and if only every-body took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world. But so long as we have got this inequality, so long we are thieving.

Unlike the animal, God has given man the faculty of reason.

It is very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet

Imperfect men have no right to judge other imperfect men.

Whenever I see an erring man, I say to myself I have also erred; when I see a lustful man I say to myself, so was I once; and in this way I feel kinship with everyone in the world and feel that I cannot be happy without the humblest of us being happy.

The man who coerces another not to eat fish commits more violence than he who eats it.

I know that man who forsakes Truth can forsake his country and his nearest and dearest ones.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

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.

It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.

To a man with an empty stomach food is God

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die.

I have found by experience that man makes his plans to be upset by God, but, at the same time, where the ultimate goal is the search of truth, on matter how a man's plans are frustrated the issue is never injurious and often better than anticipated.

All business depends upon men fulfilling their responsibilities.

The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.

Men say I am a saint losing himself in politics. The fact is that I am a politician trying my hardest to become a saint.

God never made man that he may consider another man as untouchable.

To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman.

Religions are not for separating men from one another, they are meant to bind them.

Study not man in his animal nature - man following the laws of the jungle - but study man in all his glory.

Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defense or for the defense of the defenseless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right.

A courageous man prefers death to the surrender of self-respect.

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. Violence is any day preferable to impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent.

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

When a man gives way to anger, he only harms himself.

A man who behaves like a beast is worse than the beast.

Even a little untruth destroys a man, as a drop of poison ruins milk.