“Sacrifice is joy.”

“But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.”

“I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings.”

“But the fact that I had learnt to be tolerant to other religions did not mean that I had any living faith in God.”

“In a gentle way you can shake the world.”

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”

“I learned from Hussein how to achieve victory while being oppressed”

“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.”

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

“My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity only human beings had souls, and not other living beings, for whom death meant complete extinction; while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.”

“To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.”

“The story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much, but on the contrary made me incline somewhat towards atheism.”

“I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.”

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it.