Thoughts of Power
Miscellaneous
1. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have lifebuilding, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library.
2. Poverty there must be, so long as the disease known as civilization exists: and hence the need for relief.
3. The West is groaning under the tyranny of the Shylocks, and the East is groaning under the tyranny of the priests.
4. The whole of the Western world is on a volcano which may burst tomorrow, go to pieces tomorrow.
5. Asia laid the germs of civilization, Europe developed man, and America is developing woman and the masses.
6. Three things are necessary to make every man great, every nation great
7. Conviction of the powers of goodness
8. Absence of jealousy and suspicion
9. Helping all who are trying to be and do good.
10. Do not try to lead your brethren, but serve them. The brutal mania for leading has sunk many a great ship in the waters of life.
11. The faculty of organization is entirely absent in our nature, but this has to be infused. The great secret is—absence of jealousy. Be always ready to concede to the opinions of your brethren, and try always to conciliate. That is the whole secret.
12. From all of you I want this that you must discard for ever selfaggrandizement, faction-mongering, and jealousy. You must be allforbearing like, Mother Earth. If you can achieve this, the world will be at your feet.
13. There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on only one wing.
14. Women must be put in a position to solve their own problems in their own way. No one can or ought to do this for them. And our Indian women are as capable of doing it as any in the world.
15. I know that the race that produced Sitā—even if it only dreamt of her—has a reverence for woman that is unmatched on the earth.
16. Even idiots may stand up to hear themselves praised, and cowards assume the attitude of the brave when everything is sure to turn out well, but the true hero works in silence. How many Buddhas die before one finds expression!
17. The wonderful structures of national life which the Western nations have raised, are supported by the strong pillars of character, and until we can produce numbers of such, it is useless to fret and fume against this or that power.
18. Work as if on each of you depended the whole work. Fifty centuries are looking on you, the future of India depends on you. Work on.
19. One cannot serve the God of Truth who leans upon somebody.
20. I am to create a new order of humanity here who are sincere believers in God and care nothing for the world.
21. Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Each man who thinks ahead of his time is sure to be misunderstood.
22. Life is a series of fights and disillusionments. … The secret of life is not enjoyment but education through experience. But, alas, we are called off the moment we begin really to learn.
23. The road to the Good is the roughest and steepest in the universe. It is a wonder that so many succeed, no wonder that so many fall. Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles.
24. This mixture of life and death, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance is what is called Māyā—or the universal phenomenon. You may go on for eternity inside this net, seeking for happiness—you find much, and much evil too. To have good and no evil is childish nonsense.
25. Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it be after his heart. But the intelligent man is he who can convert every work into one that suits his taste. No work is petty.
26. They only do work who think that help will come, directly they are on the field of work.
27. This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse anything outside, not to lay the blame upon any one outside, but be a man, stand up, lay the blame on yourself. You will find, that is always true. Get hold of yourself.