Saturday, May 30, 2009

Mahatma Gandhi - 1




An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody will see it.

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
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As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.

Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.

Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from where it comes.

Fear is not a disease of the body; fear kills the soul.

I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world. I believe they are all God-given and I believe that they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoints of the followers of these faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.

I do not envisage God other than truth and non-violence. If you have accepted the doctrine of ahimsa without a full realization of its implications, you are at liberty to repudiate it. I believe in confessing one’s mistakes and correcting them. Such confession strengthens one and purifies the soul. Ashima calls for the strength and courage to suffer without retaliation, to receive blows without returning any.

I have but shadowed forth my intense longing to lose myself in the Eternal and become merely a lump of clay in the Potter's divine hands so that my service may become more certain because uninterrupted by the baser self in me.

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

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.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Non-cooperation is an attempt to awaken the masses, to a sense of their dignity and power. This can only be done by enabling them to realize that they need not fear brute force, if they would but know the soul within.

Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.

Non-violence and cowardice go ill together. I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice. But true non-violence is an impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.

1 comment:

Alexandra said...

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

this I had posted for weeks on my screen and it elevated me. then life got denser and it was funny how I took it of my screen, as I was not able to do it.

thank you, now we got the whole speech!!!!!