“Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in selfsuffering.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“I become more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of Hussein, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers and his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“What is described is the conflict within the human body between opposing moral tendencies, which are imagined as distinct figures. A seer such as Vyasa would never concern himself with a description of mere physical fighting. It is the human body that is described as Kurukshetra, as dharmakshetra9 . The epithet may also mean that for a Kshatriya a battlefield is always a fi eld of dharma. Surely a fi eld on which the Pandavas too were present could not be altogether a place of sin.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“I might be ready to embrace a snake, but, if one comes to bite you, I should kill it and protect you.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“You will incur no sin by killing your kinsmen’ — this is said repeatedly in the Gita. If a person remains unconcerned with defeat or victory, knowing that they are a part of life, he commits no sin in fighting. But we should also say that he earns no merit. If we seek merit, we shall also incur sin. Even the best thing has an element of evil in it. Nothing in the world is wholly good or wholly evil. Where there is action there is some evil. If a person learns to make no distinction between gain and loss, pleasure and pain, he would rarely be tempted to commit a sin.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momentary."
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Mahatma Gandhi
“It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“I believe in the Hindu theory of Guru and his importance in spiritual realisation. I think there is a great deal of truth in the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible without a Guru.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“No one has attained his goal without action. Even men like Janaka attained salvation through action.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“A person who believes in fighting and does not regard it as violence, though it is violence, is here being asked to kill.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“I can retain neither respect nor affection for government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“In the Gita, the author has cleverly made use of the event to teach great truths.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with Truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments; it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But”
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Mahatma Gandhi