“A moral life, without reference to religion, is like a house built upon sand. And religion, divorced from morality, is like “sounding brass, good only for making a noise and breaking heads.”

“Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.”

“A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back-but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.”

“Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.”

“The Best Thing To Find Yourself Is To Loose Yourself In The Service Of Others”

“men in charge. The man complained of will not be there tomorrow, and you will have a seat with the other passengers.’ This somewhat relieved me. I had, of course, no intention of proceeding against the man who had assaulted me, and so the chapter of the assault closed there. In the morning Isa Sheth’s man took me to the coach, I got a good seat and reached Johannesburg quite safely that night. Standerton is a small village and Johannesburg a big city. Abdulla Sheth had wired to Johannesburg also, and given me the name and address of Muhammad Kasam Kamruddin’s firm there. Their man had come to receive me at the stage, but neither did I see him nor did he recognize me. So I decided to go to a hotel. I knew the names”

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”

“It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak impromptu. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk. I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

“How much more does Sonia Gandhi’s son know about the past of the party of which he is now the vice president? Not very much. In Rahul Gandhi’s understanding of his party’s history, only five leaders have mattered: his mother, his father, his grandmother, his great-grandfather and Mahatma Gandhi, the only Indian politician whom he (and Sonia) have granted parity with their own family. Gokhale, Tilak, Rajaji, Azad, Kamaraj, even (or especially) Patel—these are merely names (and sometimes not even that) to the heir apparent. By”

“I believe that just as everyone inherits a particular form so does he inherit the particular characteristics and qualities of his progenitors, and to make this admission is to conserve one's energy.”

“All your scholarship would be in vain if at the same time you do not build your character and attain mastery over your thoughts and your actions.”

“I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any”

“He who banishes all bad desires arising in his mind may be described as a sthita-prajna — one who is situated in perfect knowledge, one who is steadfast in action. Though, of course, ultimately we all should arrive at a stage when we should banish all desires, even the desire to see God; to a person in that stage all action becomes spontaneous. After one has seen God face to face, how can the desire to see Him still remain? When you have already jumped into the river, the desire to do so will no longer be there. Our desire to see God ceases when we are lost in Him, have become one with Him.”

“Distinguish between real needs and artificial wants and control the latter.”