Mahatma Gandhi Quotes on Virtue
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), the autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927), and the long sequence of writings collected in the Harijan and Young India newspapers gave twentieth-century political philosophy its most consequential reformulation of the virtues of non-violent action. The central commitments — satyagraha (the disciplined holding to truth as the foundation of political action), ahimsa (the comprehensive practice of non-injury extending from speech and thought to political confrontation), and the broader integration of personal asceticism with the public political vocation — recast the cardinal virtues around the philosophical and religious resources of the Indian tradition (Bhagavad Gita, Tolstoyan Christianity, Jain non-violence) the British Raj had relegated to the spiritual private sphere. The framework shaped the Indian independence movement, the American civil-rights movement through King and Bayard Rustin, and the broader twentieth-century political philosophy of non-violent resistance.
Quotes
-
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
We but mirror the world . All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body . If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. -
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”
-
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
-
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind.”
-
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“There is no path to peace; peace is the path.”
-
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
-
“Seven social sins: politics without principles , wealth without work , pleasure without conscience , knowledge without character , commerce without morality , science without humanity , and worship without sacrifice .”
1920s | A list closing an article in Young India (22 October 1925); Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Vol. 33 (PDF) p. 135 Variant: The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: we -
“"Politics without principle, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice — are the seven social sins."”
1920s | Originally published in Young India , 22 October 1925, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi , Vol. 33, p. 135.