Great Throughts Treasury

"Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth and the soul requires inward restfulness to attain its full height."

"Perfection is the exclusive attribute of God, and it is indescribable, untranslatable. I do believe that it is possible for human beings to become perfect. It is necessary for all of us to aspire after that perfection but when that blessed state is attained, it becomes indescribable, indefinable."

"When restraint and courtesy are added to strength, the latter becomes irresistible."

"Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plain living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man's happiness really lies in contentment."

"One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other departments. Life is one indivisible whole."

"Non-violence which is a quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain."

"The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular."

"Non-cooperation is an attempt to awaken the masses, to a sense of their dignity and power. This can only be done by enabling them to realize that they need not fear brute force, if they would but know the soul within."

"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being."

"No religion which is narrow and which cannot satisfy the test of reason, will survive the coming reconstruction of society in which the values will have changed and character, not possession of wealth, title or birth will be the test of merit."

"To a true artist only that face is beautiful which, quite apart from its exterior, shines with the truth within the soul."

"We may never be strong enough to be entirely nonviolent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep nonviolence as our goal and make strong progress towards it."

"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."

"Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one's own."

"Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today."

"Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would finish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view."

"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."

"Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people."

"Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state. There is as little reason to deplore the one as there is to be pleased over the other."

"If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time. And a living faith will last in the midst of the blackest storm."

"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances."

"If we have listening ears, God speaks to us in our own language, whatever that language be."

"Truth quenches untruth, love quenches anger, self-suffering quenches violence. This eternal rule is a rule not for saints only but for all."

"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."

"Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from where it comes."

"As a rule, the mind, residing in a body that has become weakened by pampering, is also weak, and where there is no strength of mind there can be no strength of soul."

"Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men."

"There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring, and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic. Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity."

"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."

"The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives."

"Even as a tree has a single trunk, but many branches and leaves, there is one religion but any number of faiths."

"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer."

"The world is touched by sacrifice. It does not then discriminate about the merits of a cause. Not so God - He is all seeing. He insists on the purity of the cause and on adequate sacrifice thereof."

"I believe that cunning is not only morally wrong but also politically inexpedient, and have therefore always discountenanced its use even from the practical standpoint."

"Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience."

"Restraint never ruins one's health. What ruins it,is not restraint but outward suppression. A really self-restrained person grows every day from strength to strength and from peace to more peace. The very first step in self-restraint is the restraint of thoughts."

"I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another."

"Suffering has its well-defined limits. Suffering can be both wise and unwise, and when the limit is reached, to prolong it would be not unwise but the height of folly."

"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 dissolute character is more dissolute in thought than in deed. And the same is true of violence. Our violence in word and deed is but a feeble echo of the surging violence of thought in us."

"In true democracy every man and women is taught to think for himself or herself."

"True religion is not a narrow dogma. It is not external observance. It is faith in God and living in the presence of God. It means faith in a future life, in truth and Ahimsa. There prevails today a sort of apathy towards these things of the Spirit."

"Non-cooperation is directed not against men but against measures. It is not directed against the Governors, but against the system they administer. The roots of non-cooperation lie not in hatred but in justice, if not in love."

"In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self."

"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."

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings."

"Nobody can hurt me without my permission."

"Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the I shall not fear anyone on Earth. I shall fear only God. I shall not bear ill will toward anyone. I shall not submit to injustice from anyone. I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering."

"Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny."