Gandhism

• If Gandhism means simply mechanically turning the spinning wheel, it deserves to be destroyed.

• What is Gandhism but winning Swaraj by means of truth and nonviolence?

• There is no such thing as 'Gandhism', and I do not want to leave any sect after me.

• If our ahimsa is not of the weak, and if it will bend the knee before Himsa, Gandhism deserves to be destroyed.

• They might kill me but they cannot kill Gandhism. If truth can be killed, Gandhism can be killed.

• I hold my message to be far superior to myself and far superior to the vehicle though which it is expressed.

• Unless the Charkha adds to your ahimsa and makes you stronger every day, your Gandhism is of little avail.

• I hold my message to be far superior to myself and far superior to the vehicle through which it is expressed.

• There is already enough superstition in our country. No effort should be spared to resist further addition in the shape of Gandhi worship.

• Though a non-cooperator, I shall gladly subscribe to a bill to make it criminal for anybody to call me mahatma and to touch my feet.

• Was it that you wanted do pull my leg by transporting me to the frozen Himalayan heights of ‘mahatmaship’ and claiming for yourself absolution from having to follow my precepts?

T-2-3

Gentleness

• Nonviolent acts exert pressure far more effective than violent acts, for that pressure comes from good-will and gentleness.

XXV-473

Germany

• The Germans were defeated not because they were necessarily in the wrong, but because the allied powers were found to possess greater brute strength.

• I am not just now thinking of India’s deliverance. It will come, but what will it be wrought if England and France fall, or if they come out victorious over Germany ruined and humbled.

• I must refuse to believe that Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man'’ inhuman ingenuity.

T-5-161

Gifts

• I fear the Greeks especially when they bring gifts.

• What we receive must be called a gift; for as debtors we are entitled to no consideration for the discharge of the obligations.

MOG-19

God

• God accepts the sacrifice of the pure in heart.

• God always saves the world from the consequences of unintended errors of men who live in fear of Him.

• God alone is immortal, imperishable.

• God alone is truth and everything else is transitory and illusory.

• God alone known absolute Truth.

• God answers prayer in His own way, not ours.

• God as Truth has been for me a treasure beyond price; may He be so to every one of us.

• God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart.

• God cannot be so cruel and unjust as to make the distinctions of high and low between man and man, and woman and woman.

• God cannot be realized through the intellect.

• God chooses as His instrument the humblest and weakest of His creatures to fulfill Himself.

• God created man to work for his food and said that those who ate without work were thieves.

• God demands nothing less than self – surrender as the price for the only real freedom that is worth having.

• God does not punish directly. His ways are inscrutable.

• God gifted man with intellect that he might know his Maker. Man abused it so that he might forget his Maker.

• God – given religion is beyond all speech.

• God has a thousand names, or rather He is Nameless.

• God has been described by all the scriptures of the world a protector and saviour of the sinner.

• God has blessed man with seed that has the highest potency and woman with a field richer than the richest earth to be found anywhere on his globe.

• God has blessed me with the mission to place nonviolence before the nation for adoption.

• God has enabled man to distinguish between his sister, his mother, his daughter and his wife.

• God has enabled me to affect the life of the country since 1920 without the necessity of office.

• God has given us only a limited sphere of action and a limited vision.

• God has His own way of choosing His instruments.

• God has made of man and woman one complete whole. In the scheme of nature, both of them are equal.

• God has so ordered this world that no one can keep his goodness or badness exclusively to himself.

• God having cast my lot in the midst of the people of India, I should be untrue to my Maker if I failed to serve them.

• God Himself has reserved no right of revision of His own laws nor is there any need for Him for any such revision.

• God is the hardest taskmaster I have known on this earth and He tries you through and through.

• God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience.

• God is the vital force or spirit which is all – pervading, all – embracing and, therefore, beyond human ken.

• God is the shield of the non-violent.

•  God in his wisdom circumscribed man’s vision, and rightly too, for otherwise man’s   conceit would know no bounds.

• God is always the upholder of justice.

• God is certainly one. He has no second. He is unfathomable, unknowable and unknown to the vast majority of mankind.

• God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist.

• God is continuously in action, without resting for a single moment.

• God is Light, not darkness. God is Love, not hate. God is truth, not untruth. God alone is great.

• God is not a person. God is an eternal principle.

• God is not a Power residing in the clouds. He is an unseen Power residing within us and nearer to us than finger nails to the flesh.

• God is not in Kaaba or in Kashi. He is within everyone of us.

• God is not outside this earthly case of ours.

• God is omnipresent; even a pebble in the Narmada can represent Him and serve as an object of worship.

• God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know.

• God makes crooked straight for us and sets things right when they seem to go dead wrong.

• God never made man that he may consider another man as untouchable.

• God of Truth and Justice can never create distinctions of high and low among His own children.

• God resides in every human form, indeed in every particle of His creations, in everything that is on his earth.

• God rules even where Satan seems to hold sway, because the latter exists only on God’s sufferance.

• God’s grace and revelation are the monopoly of no race or nation.

• God’s laws are eternal and unalterable and not separable from God Himself.

• God’s time never stops.

• God’s ways are more than Man’s arithmetic.

• God’s word is : He who strives never perishes.

• God to be God must rule the heart and transform it.

• God the Compassionate and the merciful, Tolerance incarnate, allows Mammon to have his nine days’ wonder.

• God took and needed no personal service. He served His creatures without demanding any service for Himself in return.

• God tries his votaries through and through, but never beyond endurance.

XXVI-159

• God was known by many names. And in the last analysis God’s names were as many as human beings.

• God, who is the embodiment of Truth and Right and Justice, can never have sanctioned a religion or practice which regards one – fifth of our vast population as untouchables.

• God will cease to be God, if he brought into being a single person with the hall – mark of inferiority.

• God will not be God, if He allowed Himself to be the object of proof by His creatures.

• God will rule the lives of all those who will surrender themselves without reservation to Him.

• I am endeavouring to see God through service of humanity; for I know that God is neither in heaven, nor down below, but in everyone.

• I am not likely to obtain the result flowing from the worship of God by laying myself prostrate before Satan.

• I believe in absolute oneness of God and, therefore, also of humanity.

• I believe in God, not as a theory but as a fact more real than life itself.

• I call God long – suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. I know that He has no evil in Him and yet if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it.

• I can neither serve God nor humanity if as an Indian I do not serve India, and as a Hindu I do not serve Indian Mussalmans.

• I can see that in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good.

• I claim no perfection for myself. But I do claim to be a passionate seeker after Truth, which is but another name for God.

• I claim to know my millions. All the hours of the day I am with them. They are my first care and God that is to be found in the hearts of the dumb millions.

• I do not accept the orthodox teaching that Jesus was or is God incarnate in the accepted sense or that he was or is the only Son of God.

• I hold it a blasphemy to say that the Creator resides in a temple from which a particular class of His devotes sharing the faith in it are excluded.

• If God is not a personal being for me like my earthy father. He is infinitely more.

• If God is vast and boundless as the ocean, how can a tiny drop like man imagine what He is?

• If God holds me to be a pure instrument for the spread of non-violence in the place of the awful violence now ruling the earth, He will give me the strength and show me the way.

• If I could persuade myself that I could find Him in a Himalayan cave I would proceed there immediately.

• If I had no God to rely upon, I should be, like Timon, a hater of my species.

• If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God. I have come to the conclusion that God is Truth.

• If it was wrong to seek God in a stone, how was it right to seek Him in a book called the Gita, the Granth Sahib or the Koran?

• If we could all give our own definitions of God, there would be as many definitions as there are men and women.

• If we had attained the full vision of Truth, we would no longer be seekers, but become one with God, for Truth is God.

• I know of no religion or sect that has done or is doing without is house of God, variously described as a temple, a mosque, a church, a synagogue or agiary.

• I know that I can never be alone as God is there with me.

• I recognise no God except the God that is to be found in the hearts of the dumb millions.

• I shall despair when I despair of myself, of God and humanity.

• I trust men only because I trust God.

• I worship the God that is Truth or Truth which is God through the service of these millions.

• By Ram Raj I do not mean Hindu Raj. I mean by Ram Raj, Divine Raj, the Kingdom of God.

• For me, Rama and Rahim are one and the same deity. I acknowledge no other God but the one God of truth and righteousness.

• For me the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or the still small Voice mean one and the same thing.

• For me the only certain means of knowing God is non-violence, ahimsa, love.

• Immediately I arrogate to myself the exclusive title to being in the right, I usurp the function of the Deity.

• I will not be a traitor of God to please the whole world.

• It is my conviction that the root of the evil is want of a living God.

• It is my unmistakable belief that not a blade of grass moves but by the divine will.

• Let me say that God will send me the plan when He gives the word as He has done before now.

• Mine is not a religion of the prison-house. It has room for the least among God’s creation.

• My religion is based on truth and nonviolence. Truth is my God. Nonviolence is the means of realizing Him.

• My religion says that only he who is prepared to suffer can pray to God.

• My varnashram refuses to bow the head before the greatest potentate on earth, but my varnashram compels me to bow down my head in all humility before knowledge, purity, before every person where I see God face to face.

• My creed is service of God and therefore of humanity.

• My faith runs so very much faster than my reason that I can challenge the whole world and say, ‘God is, was and ever shall be.’

• My fast is a matter between God and myself.

• My firm belief is that he reveals Himself daily to every human being but we shut our ears to the still small Voice.

• My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents, and I lay them both at His feet.

• Since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is.

• The life of the millions is my politics, from which I dare not free myself without denying my life-work and God.

• The purer I try to become, the nearer I feel to be to God.

• To me Truth is God and there is no way to find Truth except the way of nonviolence.

• To me God is Truth and love, God is ethics and morality, God is fearlessness.

• What God may have enabled me to do is but a repayment debt, and he who repays a debt deserves no praise.

• What I want to achieve, what I have been striving and pining for these thirty year, is self-realization, that is, to see God face to face.

• With me the connection between the cosmic phenomena and human behaviour is a living faith that draws me nearer to God, humbles me and makes me readier for facing Him.

• You may pluck out my eyes, but that cannot kill me. You may chop off my nose, but that will not kill me. But blast my belief in God, and I am dead.

• A fear – stricken person can never know God, and one who knows God will never fear a mortal man.

• A mind not set on God is given to wandering and lacks the quality of a temple of worship.

• Ahimsa is theory, no one knows. It is as indefinable as God.

• All of us with one voice call one God differently as Parmatma, Ishwara, Shiva, Vishnu, Rama, Allah, Khuda, Dada-Hormuzda, Jehovah, God and an infinite variety of names.

• A personal selfish prayer is bad whether made before an image or an unseen God.

• All religions enjoined worship of the One God who was all-pervasive. He was present even in a drop of water or in a tiny speck of dust.

• All the dry ethics of the world turn to dust because apart from God they are lifeless.

• All the religions of the world describe God pre-eminently as the Friend of the friendship, Help of the helpless, and Protector of the weak.

• A satyagrahi should have a living faith in God.

• As soon as we become one with the ocean in the shape of God, there is no more rest for us, nor indeed do we need rest any longer.

• Assumption of superiority by any person over any other is a sin against God and man.

• Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts, but by his intentions.

• Buddha emphasized and redeclared the eternal and unalterable existence of the moral government of this universe. He unhesitatingly said that the law was God Himself.

• Calling them devadasis we insult God Himself in the name of religion.

• Celibacy is a great help, inasmuch as it enables one to lead a life of full surrender to God.

• Conversion without a clean heart is a denial of God and religion.

• Cowardice is not a sign of belief in God.

• "Do not worry in the least about yourself, leave all worry to God" this appears to be the commandment in all religions.

• Even the atheists, who have pretended to disbelieve in God, have believed in Truth.

• Fight if you must on the path of righteousness and God will be with you.

• He is no God who merely satisfies the intellect, if He ever does.

• He who has a living faith in God will not do evil deeds with name of God on his lips.

• If we have listening ears, God speaks to us in our own language, whatever that language be.

• If we will take care of today, God will take care of the morrow.

• If you have faith in the cause and the means and in God, the hot sun will be cool for you.

• In a strictly scientific sense God is at the bottom of both good and evil.

• In His boundless love God permits the atheist to live.

• In the Gita continuous concentration on God is the king of sacrifices.

• Its unadulterated belief in the oneness of God and a practical application of the truth of the brotherhood of man for those who are nominally within its fold are two distinctive contributions of Islam.

• It is better to be charged with cowardice and weakness than to be guilty of denial of our oath and sin against God.

• It is impossible that God, who is the God of Justice, could have made the distinctions that men observe today in the name of religion.

• It is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent.

• It needs more than a heart of oak to shed all fear except the fear of God.

• It was manly and dignified to rely upon God for the dissolution of all troubles. He was the only infallible help, guide and friend.

• Let us fear God and we shall cease to fear man.

• Living faith in God means acceptance of the brotherhood of mankind.

• Meditation is waiting on God.

• Never own defeat in a sacred cause and make up your minds henceforth that you will be pure and that you will find a response from God.

• Nonviolence succeeds only when we have a real living faith in God.

• Nonviolence is an attribute of the Almighty whose ways of fulfilling Himself are inscrutable.

• Man alone is made in the image of God.

• Man can only conceive God within the limitation of his own mind.

• Man can only describe God in his own poor language.

• Man can only try and perish in the attempt. God is all in all. We are only zeros.

• Man in the flesh is essentially imperfect. He may be described as being made in the image of God but is far from being God.

• Man is not at peace with himself till he was become like unto God.

• Man should earnestly desire the well – being of all God’s creation and pray that we may have the strength to do so.

• No man has ever been able to describe God fully. The same holds true of ahimsa.

• The man who eats to live, who is friends with the five powers – earth, water, ether, sun and air – who is a servant of God, the Creator of all these, ought not to fall ill.

• The man who fears man falls from the estate of man. Fear God alone.

• When a man fasts, it is not the gallons of water he drinks that sustains him, but God.

• When a man wants to make up with his Maker, he does not consult a third party.

• A man cannot serve God and Mammon, nor be "temperate and furious’ at the same time.

• A man of faith does not bargain of stipulate with God.

• A man of God never strives after untruth and therefore he can never lose hope.

• A man who is intentionally unarmed relies upon the Unseen Force called God by poets, but called the Unknown by scientists.

• A man with a grain of faith in God never loses hope, because he ever believes in the ultimate triumph of Truth.

• A man who throws himself on God ceases to fear man.

• A person who believes in nonviolence believes in a living God. He cannot accept defeat.

• Of all the myriads of God, Daridranarayana is the most sacred inasmuch as it represents the untold millions of the poor people as distinguished from the few rich people.

• One is ever young in the felt presence of the God of Truth, or Truth which is God.

• One may banish the word "God" from the Congress but one has no power to banish the Thing Itself.

• One who would serve will not waste a thought upon his own converts, which he leaves to be attended to or neglected by him Master on high.

• Often does good come out of evil. But that is God’s, not man’s plan.

• Our prayer is a heart search. It is a reminder to ourselves that we are helpless without His support.

• Outward appearance was nothing to Him if it was not an expression of the inner.

• Prayer is an impossibility without a living faith in the presence of God within.

• Punishment is God’s. He alone is the infallible Judge.

• Rama, Allah and God are to me convertible terms.

• Religion all the world over offered God as the solace and comfort for all in agony.

• Religion was entirely a personal matter. Each one could approach his Creator as he liked.

• Satyagraha is search for Truth, and God is Truth.

• Search for Truth is search for Truth, and God is Truth.

• Seeing God face to face is to feel that He is enthroned in our hearts even as a child feels a mother’s affection without needing any demonstration.

• Shraddha means self – confidence and self – confidence means faith in God.

• Surely, Conscience is but a poor and laborious paraphrase of the simple combination of three letters called God.

• Surely, conversion is a matter between man and his Maker who alone knows His creatures’ hearts.

• Imperialism is a negation of God. It does not ungodly acts in the name of God.

• That which impels man to do the right is God.

• That which makes man the mere playing of fate is God.

• Undoubtedly, prayer requires a living faith in God. Successful Satyagraha is inconceivable without that faith.

• The art of dying bravely and with honour does not need any special training, save a living faith in God.

• The eternal duel between Ormuzd and Ahriman, God and Satan, is raging in my breast, which is one among their billion battlefields.

• The giddy heights which man’s ingenuity is attempting take us away from our Maker, who is nearer to us than the nails are to the flesh which they cover.

• The idol in the temple is not God. But since God resides in every atom. He resides in an idol.

• The knowledge of the omnipresence of God also means respect for the lives even of those who may be called opponents.

• The Law and the Lawgiver are one.

• The Law is God. Anything attributed to Him is not a mere attribute. He is Truth, Love, Law and a million things that human ingenuity can name.

• The Law which governs all life is God.

• The non-violent man automatically becomes a servant of God.

• The power we call God defies description.

• There are innumerable definitions of God because His manifestations are innumerable.

• There can be in the eyes of God no distinction between man and man, even as there is no distinction between animal and animal.

• There is only one God for us all, whether we find him through the Koran, the Zend-Avesta, The Tolmud, or the Gita.

• There was no greater spellbinder of peace than the name of God.

• The sky may be overcast today with clouds, but a fervent prayer to God is enough to dispel them.

• The sum of all that lives is God.

• The sum total of all that lives is God. We may not be God but we are of God even as a little drop of water is of the ocean.

• The sum total of Karma is God.

• The truth is that God is the force. He is the essence of life. He is pure and undefiled consciousness. He is eternal.

• The turning of the Charkha in a lifeless way will be like the turning of the beads of the rosary with a wandering mind turned away from God.

• The Vedas are a indefinable as God and Hinduism.

• This belief in God has to be based on faith which transcends reason.

• This feeling of helpless in us has really arisen from our deliberate dismissal of God from our common affairs.

• Though God may be Love, God is Truth above all.

• Though Philosophical Hinduism has no other god but God, it cannot be denied that practical Hinduism is not so emphatically uncompromising as Islam.

• To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages.

• To bear all kinds of tortures without a murmur of resentment is not possible for a human being without the strength that comes from God.

• To reject the necessity of temples is to reject the necessity of God, religion and earthly existence.

• To say that a single human being, because of his birth, becomes an untouchable, unapproachable or invisible is to deny God.

• Truth is God, and Truth overrides all our plans. The whole Truth is only embodied within the heart of Great Power – Truth.

• Truth is the right designation of God.

• Waiting on God means increasing purity.

• We do not know the laws of God, nor their working.

• What is impossible with man in child’s play with God.

• When the neglect of the call means a denial of God, civil disobedience becomes a peremptory duty.

• When you want to find Truth as God, the only inevitable means is love, that is, nonviolence.

• When we fear God, then we shall fear no man, however high-placed he may be.

• Where love is, there God is also.

• Who is there in the world who can insult the God in the image?

• Without living Truth, God is nowhere.

• Without an unreserved surrender to His grace, complete mastery over thoughts is impossible.

• You are not going to know the meaning of God or prayer unless you reduce yourself to a cipher.

• You will find that God is always by the side of the fearless.

• You will not pit one word of God against another word of God.

T-4-138

Gold

• If gold were as easily available as iron, it would not for all its glitter have the same value that it has today.

• Not all our gold and jewellery could satisfy our hunger and quench our thirst.

• A regenerate outgrows the original taint, even as purified gold outgrows the original alloy.

T-4-76

Golden Rule

• "Judge not lest ye be judged" is a golden rule.

XXV-463

Good – Goodness

• The gold that man does is more often than not better left unsaid.

• Although evil seemed at times to rule the world, the eternal truth was that the world lived so long as goodness resided even in one person.

• In a strictly scientific sense God is at the bottom of both good and evil.

• Religion taught us to return good for evil.

• Tolerance obviously does not disturb the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil.

• My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of Satyagraha and not at all to describe how good I am.

• A drop torn from the ocean perishes without doing any good.

T-7-343

Goondas

• Goondas flourish only in the midst of timid people.

• It is we who make the goondas. Without our sympathy and passive support, goondas would have no legs to stand upon.

• It is a part of the struggle for liberty, if it is non-violent, to reclaim even the goondas, whether they are to be found among the people or those in authority.

• Intolerance is a form of goondaism (hooliganism). It is no less disgraceful than savagery.

• My whole soul rises against the very idea of the custody of my religion passing into the hands of goondas.

XXV-169

Govt. – Government Of India

• A government builds its prestige upon the apparently voluntary association of the governed.

• A non-violent system of government is clearly an impossibility to long as the wide gulf between the rich and hungry millions persists.

• Government of the people by the people and for the people cannot be conducted at the bidding of one man, however great he may be.

• Our non-violence in respect of the Government is a result of our incapacity for effective violence.

• The schools and colleges are really a factory for turning out clerks for Government.

• Civil disobedience is not only the natural right of a people, especially when they have no effective voice in their own Government, But that it is also a substitute for violence or armed rebellion.

• I have not hesitated to call the system of Government under which we are labouring ‘satanic’ and I withdraw naught out of it.

• The nation’s non-co-operation is an invitation to the Government to co-operate with it on its own terms, as is every nation’s right and very good government’s duty.

• What crimes, for which we condemn the Government as satanic, have we not been guilty of towards our own untouchable brethren?

• Under my plan, the state will be there to carry our the will of the people, not to dictate to them or to force them to do its will.

• Every person in a well-ordered state is fully conscious of both his responsibility and his rights.

• The stability of State depends upon the readiness of every citizen to subordinate his rights to those of the rest.

• No matter what the cause was and wherever it was, Indian governments must never requisition the services of British soldiers to deal with civil disturbances.

• Do not concentrate on showing the misdeeds of the government, for we have to convert and befriend those who run it.

• Originally there could be none in a close monopoly organisation like the Government of India.

T-7-56

Grave

• We shall dig our won grave if we do not purge ourselves of this curse of untouchability.

T-3-233

Gravitation

• The law of love will work just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not.

T-3-11

Greatness

• The greatest to be great has to be lowliest by choice.

• True greatness in the world is not found set upon a hill for the vulgar crowd to see.

• God alone is the judge of true greatness because He knows men’s hearts.

• God is Light, not darkness, God is love, not hate, God is Truth, not untruth. God alone is great.

XXV-479