India has an unbroken tradition of nonviolence from times immemorial.

I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man.

All satyagraha and fasting is a species of tyaga. It depends for its effects upon an expression of wholesome public opinion shorn of all bitterness.

My interest in India's freedom will cease if she adopts violent means, for their fruit will not be freedom but slavery in disguise.

If you don't ask, you don't get it.

Religion is a thing to be lived. It is not merely sophistry.

A nation that is unfit to fight cannot, from experience, prove the virtue of not fighting.

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.

Faith is a function of the heart.

It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.

Love never claims, it ever gives. Love ever suffers, never resents never revenges itself.

Personally I crave not for 'independence', which I do not understand, but I long for freedom from the English yoke.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

I have felt that the Gita teaches us that what cannot be followed in day-to-day practice cannot be called religion.

Art to be art must soothe.

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.

A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.

Freedom is like birth. Till we are fully free, we are slaves.

The sum total of karma is God.

Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself.

A popular government wields a moral force, which is infinitely superior to the physical force that the foreign government could summon to its assistance.

Real beauty is my aim.