“It is good for me to draw near to God; I have put my trust in the Lord God and made Him my refuge, that I may tell of all Your works. PSALM 73:28” 

“Be sure that your praise songs are numbered higher than your sorrowful dirges and your utmost hope, firmer than your woeful regrets. Be positive.”

“The will of God will not take us where the grace of God cannot sustain us.”

“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.”

“To see Gokhale at work was as much a joy as an education. He never wasted a minute. His private relations and friendships were all for public good. All his talks had reference only to the good of the country and were absolutely free from any trace of untruth or insincerity.”

“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.”

“You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great”

“No matter what you do, 10% of the population will not like you.” 

“Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!”

“Courage, dear heart.”

“You are the only person on earth who can use your ability.”

“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening

“Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everyone is standing around reloading”

“If we make a decision and then continue to go back and forth in our mind about whether we did the right thing or not, we are unstable in our ways.” 

“Never memorize something that you can look up.”