“This is the centre round which the Gita is woven. This renunciation is the central sun, round which devotion, knowledge and the rest revolve like planets. The body has been likened to a prison. There must be action where there is body. Not one embodied being is exempted from labour. And yet all religions proclaim that it is possible for man, by treating the body as the temple of God, to attain freedom. Every action is tainted, be it ever so trivial. How can the body be made the temple of God? In other words how can one be free from action, i.e. from the taint of sin? The Gita has answered the question in decisive language: ‘By desireless action; by renouncing fruits of action; by dedicating all activities to God, i.e., by surrendering oneself to Him body and soul.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“But so long as I lived under a system of Government based on force and voluntarily partook of the many facilities and privileges it created for me, I was bound to help that Government to the extent of my ability when it was engaged in a war, unless I non-co-operated with the Government and renounced to the utmost of my capacity the privileges it offered me.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“Even if we believe in non-violence, it would not be proper for us to refuse, through cowardice, to protect the weak. I might be ready to embrace a snake, but, if it comes to bite you, I would kill it to protect you. If Arjuna had forgotten the difference between kinsmen and others and had been so filled with the spirit of non-violence so as to bring about a change of heart in Duryodhana, he would have been another Shri Krishna. However, he believed Duryodhana to be wicked.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“How it is that Bengal with all its knowledge, intelligence, sacrifice, and emotion tolerates this slaughter?”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“You civilised fellows are all cowards. Great men never look at a person’s exterior. They think of his heart.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“people continued—regardless of all that leads man forward—to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“How heavy is the toll of sins and wrongs that wealth, power and prestige exact from man!”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“Intolerance is a species of violence and therefore against our creed.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“If one Ponders on objects of the sense, there springs Attraction; from attraction grows desire, Desire flames to fierce passion, passion breeds Recklessness; then the memory—all betrayed— Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind, Till purpose, mind, and man are all undone.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
“One thing we have endeavoured to observe most scrupulously, namely, never to depart from the strictest facts and, in dealing with the difficult questions that have arisen during the year, we hope that we have used the utmost moderation possible under the circumstances.”
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Mahatma Gandhi
