Quotes from The Story of My Experiments With Truth

Mahatma Gandhi ·  560 pages

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“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“What barrier is there that love cannot break?”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“But you can wake a man only if he is really asleep. No effort that you make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending sleep.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Men often become what they believe themselves to be.If I believe I cannot do something,it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can , then I acquire the ability to do it even If I didn't have it in the beginning".”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth



“Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“إن الرجل الصادق ينبغي أن يكون رجلاً ذا عناية واهتمام أيضاً”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“الرجل الذي يطمح إلى رؤية روح الحقيقة، لا يستطيع أن يعتزل الحياة، ولذلك قادني تعبّدي للحقيقة إلى حقل السياسة، وأستطيع القول دون تردد أن الذين يزعمون أن الدين لا علاقة له بالسياسة لا يعرفون معنى الدين”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth



“Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world... It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. for we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non­resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self­suffering.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth



“Our duty is very simple and plain. We want to serve the community, and in our own humble way to serve the Empire. We believe in the righteousness of the cause, which it is our privilege to espouse. We have an abiding faith in the mercy of the Almighty God, and we have firm faith in the British Constitution. That being so, we should fail in our duty if we wrote anything with a view to hurt.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“There are innumerable definitions of God, because His manifestations are innumerable.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“I have called her beautiful, because it was her moral beauty that at once attracted me. True beauty after all consists in purity of heart.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth



“No matter how explicit the pledge, people will turn and twist the text to suit their own purpose”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Truthis like a vast tree, which yields more and more fruit, the more you nurture it”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“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.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service. The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is from without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be profitable only when exercised from within. If this line of reasoning is correct, how many of the journals in the world would stand the test? But who would stop those that are useless? And who should be the judge? The useful and the useless must, like good and evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“No reform is possible unless some of the educated and the rich voluntarily accept the status of the poor, travel third, refuse to enjoy the amenities denied to the poor, and instead of taking avoidable hardships, discourtesies, and injustice as a matter of course, fight for their removal.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth



“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.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“I think it is wrong to expect certainties in this world, where all else but God that is Truth is an uncertainty. All that appears and happens about and around us is uncertain, transient. But there is a Supreme Being hidden therein as a Certainty, and one would be blessed if one could catch a glimpse of that Certainty and hitch one's waggon to it. The quest for that Truth is the summum bonum of life.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


“While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, quote from The Story of My Experiments With Truth


About the author

Mahatma Gandhi
Born place: in Porbander, Gujrat, India
Born date October 2, 1869
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