My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.
I do not like the word tolerance, but could not think of a better one. Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one.
The light of the world will illuminate within you when you fast and purify yourself.
What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.
More caution and perhaps more restraint are necessary in breaking a fast than in keeping it.
Wherever flaxseeds become a regular food item among the people, there will be better health.
A perfect mind comes from a perfect heart, not the heart known by a doctor’s stethoscope but the heart which is the seat of God.
Prayer needs no speech. It is in itself independent of any sensuous effort. But it must be combined with the utmost humility.
Ill-digested principles are, if anything, worse than ill-digested food, for the latter harms the body and there is cure for it, whereas the former ruins the soul and there is no cure for it.
If I preach against the modern artificial life of sensual enjoyment, and ask men and women to go back to the simple life epitomized in the charkha, I do so because I know that without an intelligent return to simplicity, there is no escape from our d.
A dissolute character is more dissolute in thought than in deed. And the same is true of violence. Our violence in word and deed is but a feeble echo of the surging violence of thought in us.
To say that God permits evil in the world may not be pleasing to the ear. But if He is held responsible for the good, it follows that He has to be responsible for the evil too.
Hypocrisy and distortion are passing currents under the name of religion.
Infinite Love is a weapon of matchless potency. It is the ‘summum bonum’ of life. It is an attribute of the brave, in fact it is their all. It does not come within the each of the coward. It is no wooden of lifeless dogma but a living and life-giving.
A living faith cannot be manufactured by the rule of majority.
I do not want my house to be rounded by walls and my windows to be closed to other cultures. I wish to become familiar with the culture of lands as much as possible but I will not permit them to affect me or shake me from my own status.
A woman’s intuition has often proved truer than a man’s arrogant assumption of knowledge.
To me I seem to be constantly growing. I must respond to varying conditions, yet remain changeless within.
The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress.
An education which does not teach us to discriminate between good and bad, to assimilate the one and eschew the other, is a misnomer.