“It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”

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

“Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.”

“Today I know that physical training should have as much place in the curriculum as mental training.”

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

“Il arrive un moment de la vie où l'on n'a même plus besoin de déclarer publiquement ses pensées et encore bien moins de les manifester par des actes extérieurs. Les pensées agissent par elles mêmes. Elles peuvent être douées de ce pouvoir. On peut dire de celui dont la pensée est action que son apparente inaction est sa vraie manière d'agir… C'est dans ce sens que je dirige mes efforts.”

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

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

“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.”

“Human language can but imperfectly describe God’s ways.”

“I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realised that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”

“Let every youth take a leaf out of my book and make it a point to account for everything that comes into and goes out of his pocket, and like me he is sure to be a gainer in the end.”

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

“If physical fasting is not accompanied by mental fasting it is bound to end in hypocrisy and disaster.”

“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.”