“the basis of my vegetarianism is not physical, but moral. If anybody said that I should die if I did not take beef tea or mutton, even on medical advice, I would prefer death.”

“I saw that a man of truth must also be a man of care.”

“Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth”

“Even in small matters, we can say, our intellect is not resolute. It will be resolute only if we fix our minds on one purpose and cling to it with discrimination, only if we work without looking for immediate results. At present, whether in politics or social reform we leap from one branch to another. I began with the illustration of a ball of earth and told you that, even if we concentrate on that, we can realise the atman.”

“world has things which full fill man needs, but not greeds.”

“Just as a man would not cherish living in a body other than his own, so do nations not like to live under other nations, however noble and great the latter may be.”

“Children inherit the qualities of the parents, no less than their physical features. Environment does play an important part, but the original capital on which a child starts in life is inherited from its ancestors. I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul. Polak and I had often very heated discussions about the desirability or otherwise of giving the children an English education. It has always been my conviction that Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country. They deprive them of the spiritual and social heritage of the nation, and render them to that extent unfit for the service of the country. Having these convictions, I made a point of always talking to my children in Gujarati. Polak never liked this. He thought I was spoiling their future. He contended, with all the vigour and love at his command, that, if children were to learn a universal language like English from their infancy, they would easily gain considerable advantage over others in the race of life. He failed to convince me. I do not now remember whether I convinced him of the correctness of my attitude, or whether he gave me up as too obstinate. This happened about twenty years ago, and my convictions have only deepened with experience. Though my sons have suffered for want of full literary education, the knowledge of the mother-tongue that they naturally acquired has been all to their and the country’s good, inasmuch as they do not appear the foreigners they would otherwise have appeared. They naturally became bilingual, speaking and writing English with fair ease, because of daily contact with a large circle of English friends, and because of their stay in a country where English was the chief language spoken.”

“Truth is like a vast tree which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mind of truth, the richer the discovery of the gems buried there.”

“No matter how well one cultivates vairagya or how diligent one is in performing good actions or what measure of bhakti, devotion, one practises, one will not shed the sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ till one has attained knowledge. One can attain self-realisation only if one sheds this attachment to the ego. Only when this ‘I’ is done away with can one attain self-realisation. A man’s devotion to God is to be judged from the extent to which he gives up his stiffness and bends low in humility. Only then will he be, not an impostor, but a truly illumined man, a man of genuine knowledge.”

“Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.”

“God is one whole; we are the parts.”

“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.”

“Religion which takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.”

“Thinking along these lines, I have felt that in trying to enforce in one’s life the central teaching of the Gita, one is bound to follow Truth and ahimsa.”

“And when the old deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage to a limited number of rulers.