- ‘He lives on rice and fruit, and drinks only water. He sleeps on the floor – sleeps very little, and works incessantly. His body does not seem to count at all. There is nothing striking about him – except his whole expression of ‘infinite patience and infinite love’. W.W. Pearson, who met him inSouth Africa Assisi
- ‘The most universal answer to the question as to what one felt around him was: ‘In his presence one could not tell a lie’. ’ (63)
- ‘In transferring clinical insights to historical persons and events, however, the clinician all too easily makes himself believe that he is engaged in ‘therapy’ on a larger (social, historical) scale.’ (65)
- ‘In all of Gandhi’s utterances at that time, two themes stood out, new in the independence movement: never start what you have not clearly circumscribed in your own mind or what you are not ready to suffer for to the very end.’ (89)
- ‘the very soul of revolution – a soul which, in its refusal to admit any tiredness, any aging, seems permanently enthused.’ (90)
- ‘What was extraordinary was the way his adventures ended. In every case he posed for himself a problem for which he sought a solution by framing a proposition in moral algebra. ‘Never again’ was his promise to himself after each escapade. And he kept his promise.’ B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (97)
- ‘I consider any attempt to reduce a leader of Gandhi’s stature to earlier as well and bigger and better childhood traumata both wrong in method and evil in influence.’ (99)
- ‘While he always felt relatively isolated in groups, his was the most intense search for one-to-one relationships, until in South Africa he found a professional and political style of being one-to-one with a community of followers.’ (107)
- ‘While he was playful and without fear when he could set his own pace, he proved uninterested in all organized games.’ (109)
- ‘Even to begin to understand the child and the youth who was going to be Gandhi and the Mahatma – so I have indicated – it is necessary to assume that he emerged from the love and care of his relationship with his mother as one given to one intense relationship at a time and this a relationship of service, nay, salvation of the other.’ (114)
- ‘While others may accept deprivations in order to be worthy of the support of traditional teachings and the sanction of certified teaches of the traditional, Gandhi had to create a new tradition.’ (120)
- ‘But all genital desire remained stigma and all yielding a catastrophe: which puts quite a burden on the children who are the accidental issue of such transgressions.’ (122)
- ‘… I have come to call ‘the curse’ in the lives of spiritual innovators with a similarly precocious and relentless conscience. It is indicative of an aspect of childhood or youth which comes to represent an account that can never be settled and remains an existential debt all the rest of a lifetime.’ (128)
- ‘This human crisis [the Oedipus complex] is obviously shared by all men, and to highlight it retrospectively in the case of an uncommon man would seem to be a rather minor triumph of ingenuity, if one cannot clarify what makes the man and his complex uncommon.’ (132)
- ‘But the freedom to be grown up – grown up enough to light a cigarette – often comes only when the disapproving parent is dead.’ (134)
- ‘Mehtab’s role is Mohan’s life was obviously one of elemental significance, not only because the young Muslim was such a ‘devil’, but because Mohandas chose him and stubbornly held onto him in order to test, I believe, the devil in himself.’ (135)
- ‘Experiments with Truth? Yes, I believe (with that folksy moral) that some such experimentation was necessary for the future leader, for the young man was just about to become the slave of his precocious conscience and all too much addicted to the haughty and habitual use of a tone of moral superiority. It is unthinkable that a man of Gandhi’s ethical structure could have remained (or remained only) a moralist who would never face his negative identity.’ (136)
- ‘Mehtab, as is the want of evil reformers, apparently considered it necessary to make his friend crudely jealous of his wife, fanning the passionate old wish to possess one person totally.’ (136)
- ‘Insofar as there is propaganda in all famous autobiographies (most brazenly so in that of another well-known vegetarian, Adolf Hitler…’ (144)
- ‘A moratorium is also a period for meeting one’s neurosis.’ (147)
- ‘There was, and there would be, much vanity in his poverty, much conceit in his humility, and much stubborn persistence in his helplessness, until he would find a leverage to make – for himself and for the destitute Indians – out of poverty, humility and helplessness a new strength and a new instrument? (153)
- ‘For the bulk of the tens of thousand of poor Indians in South Africa, there was not even the remedy of such cultural pseudologia, for they were the ‘indentured laborers’ who had been shipped to Africa under an agreement that they would work in mines and fields for five years and then either be paid the return fare to India or be permitted to remain as ‘freed’ Indians, only to be kept in a condition of semi-slavery in the British, as well as the Boer, states of South Africa.’ (165)
- ‘And if, at the end, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is within You seemed to be the answer, one can only recall Luther’s formula according to which man, if he only knew it, was already saved by faith.’ (169)
- ‘Conspicuous in [Gandhi’s] book case were the writings of Tolstoy, Madam Blavatsky and Edward Maitland, publications of Esoteric Christian Union and the Vegetarian Society, the Koran and the Bible, literature on Christian, Hindu, and other religions, and biographies of Indian national leaders.’ (174)
- ‘The very course of human life seems to decree that man, between a certain romantic, or heroic, or morbid consciousness of death during adolescence – when he faces the question of ‘To be or not to be’ (to which I would add the word ‘himself’) – and the acute certainty of death in old age, must participate in that mutual consolidation of identities and solidarities, and opportunities which the Hindu call Householdership.’ (195)
- ‘All ritualization and consolidation leads eventually to rigidity, hypocrisy, and vanity.’ (195)
- ‘We have sketched (we could do no more) the gradual consolidation of his professional, economic, and political capacities in an over-all identity of service. He could have spared himself much agony by becoming a missionary of some kind. But all his accounts of his deepening involvements reveal that this man never tried to cheat destiny by not getting involved in what he felt drawn to, whether this might lead him to active affirmation or to stubborn negation.’ (196)
- ‘The volunteer pickets (from age twelve upwards) who later warned Indians to stay away from the registration offices, or who (holy Satyagraha) escorted political registrants through their own picket lines to demonstrate that to register or not to register was a man’s private decision.’ (201)
- ‘Satyagraha offered on every occasion seasonable or otherwise would be corrupted… And if any one takes to Satyagraha without having measured his own strength and afterwards sustains a defeat, he not only disgraces himself but he also brings… Satyagraha into disrepute by his folly.’ Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa
- ‘I have come across passages which almost brought me to the point where I felt unable to continue writing this book because I seemed to sense the presence of a kind of untruth in the very protestation of truth; of something unclean when all the words spelled out an unreal purity; and above all, of displaced violence where nonviolence was the professed issue.’ (231)
- ‘My task in this book is to confront the spiritual truth as you have formulated and lived it with the psychological truth which I have learned and practiced.’ (231)
- ‘Here, I submit, the future of Satyagraha is at stake, and this not because you ‘pretend’ a love which you do not feel, but rather because you seem either unaware of or want to wish or pray away – an ambivalence, a co-existence of love and hate, which must become conscious in those who work for peace.’ (234)
- ‘Here, I submit, the future of Satyagraha is at stake, and this not because you ‘pretend’ a love which you do not feel, but rather because you seem either unaware of or want to wish or pray away – an ambivalence, a co-existence of love and hate, which must become conscious in those who work for peace.’ (234)
- ‘It is in daily life and especially in the life of children that the human propensity for violence is founded; and we now suspect that much of that excess of violence which distinguishes man from animals is created in him by those child-training methods which set one part of him against another. It is not enough any more – not after the appearance of your Western contemporary, Freud – to be a watchful moralist. For we now have detailed insights into our inner ambiguities, ambivalences, and instinctual conflicts; and only an additional leverage of truth based on self-knowledge promises to give us freedom in the full light of conscious day, whereas in the past, moralistic terrorism succeeded only in driving our worst proclivities underground, to remain there until riotous conditions of uncertainty or chaos would permit them to emerge redoubled.’ (234)
- ‘Nowhere do[es Gandhi] indicate that [he] cared to understand what [his] usurpation of motherhood meant to the children – or, indeed, to the mothers.’ (241)
- ‘[Gandhi] exhorted them to be truthful… but repeatedly threatened to disavow and disown them when their truth meant rebellion against [him].’ (243)
- ‘If, then, in order to fathom the truth we must hold onto the potential of love in all hate, so must we become aware of the hate which is in all love. Only if we accept the prevalence ambivalence in the most loving human encounters does truth become just what you mean by it, namely, that which supports evolving humanity in the antagonisms of divided function.’ (244)
- ‘Sigmund Freud was, in fact, the only other man in our time who offered to the reading world such candid descriptions of small events in his life as you revealed of yours[, Gandhi], and this not in the now-fashionable form of literary self-exhibiting, but strictly for the sake of a theory and technique of truthfulness.’ (244)
- ‘In studying [Gandhi’s] method of Satyagraha, I have become increasingly convinced that psychoanalysis, not if judged by its physicalistic terminology and theory but if understood as it is practiced and lived according to the rules and the intentions of its originator, amounts to a truth method, with all the implications which the word truth has in Satyagraha.’ (244-245)
- ‘Pedagogically speaking, I should say that ahimsa must come to include, beyond the insurance of another’s physical inviolacy, the protection of another’s essence as a developing person.’ (248)
- ‘To kill sinners for a ‘just cause’, to become a hero in taking the chance of being killed in the act of so killing, and to venerate such heroism as absolute in the eyes of God – all this frees us from the common human burden of living guiltily and absurdly. And yet we cannot become one species without assuming together, that burden.’ (249-250)
- ‘Here is seems of utmost significance that you, in attempting to be both spiritual and political, detached and activist, create an impossible dilemma with your implicit vilification of procreation. For without an alliance with the Hereness of women as the guardians of an earthy order dedicated to an optimal hospitality toward planned progeny, man would have to re-create Satyagraha, ever again, out of conflicts so morbid (because so crudely male) that only crime, riot, and war could relieve the unbearable pressure.’ (252)
- ‘Your involvement in the life of your people brings it about that, in protesting ‘namelessness,’ you come to be a name on everybody’s lips; in being zero, you aspire to be everything to everybody; and, by the same token, in trying to be free of all familial bonds, you usurp motherhood along with fatherhood. But all this, God help me, is not by way of an accusation or even a clinical judgment. I can only view with awe a man who (making himself more transparent than any of the saviors and saints of the mythologized past) improvised every item in the inventory of saintliness – nakedness, poverty, silence, chastity, and charity – without being baptized or ordained in any traditional investiture; and who attempted to apply the power of that position in every waking minute to the Here and the Now as lived by the masses of men.’ (253)
- ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century a period of intellectual anarchy had set in, which swept the rising generation before it like a craft which had snapped its moorings. Westernism became the fashion of the day – and Westernism demanded of it votaries that they should cry down the civilization of their own country. The more ardent their admiration for everything Western, the more vehement became their denunciation of everything Eastern. The ancient learning was despised; ancient custom and tradition were thrust aside; ancient religion was decried as an outworn superstition. The ancient foundations upon which the complete structure of Hindu society had been built up were undermined; and the new generation of iconoclasts found little enough with which to underpin the edifice which they were so recklessly depriving of its own foundations.’ Early of Ronaldshay, The Heart of Aryavarta (277)
- ‘The cultural assault was paralleled by the missionary offensive, which we need not describe here. Gandhi, it says, attempted to absorb what Christ’s teachings had to offer to the enlightened Hindu, while he defended himself and the youth of India against ‘Christianity without Christ’. ’ (277)
- ‘Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the Indian Civil Service was composed exclusively of Englishmen who intended only to return home when their service was up.’ (277)
- ‘The British people filled all the high offices, but obviously they could not fill the smaller offices and the clerkships. Clerks were wanted, and it was to produce clerks that schools and colleges were first started by the British. Ever since then this has been the main purpose of education in India
- ‘It is a beautiful thing to know that the wealthiest among us have often felt that to have remained voluntarily poor would have been a higher state for them.’ Gandhi (281)
- ‘Our language is the reflection of ourselves, and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thought, then I say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence, the better for us… The charge against us is, that we have no initiative. How can we have any if we are to devote the precious years of our life to the mastery of a foreign tongue?’ Gandhi (282)
- ‘Our salvation can only come through the farmer.’ Gandhi (283)
- ‘Any place became [Gandhi’s] home, where he determined to dig is as a Satyagrahi; and that meant to make a painstakingly detailed and fair study of the facts, to present them in an open and generous way in public meetings, to formulate minimum demands backed up by the threat to take recourse in Satyagraha.’ (294)
- ‘Life to me would lose all its interest if I felt that I could not attain perfect love on earth. After all, what matters is that our capacity for loving ever expands.’ Gandhi (316)
- ‘We do not prove ourselves good by calling others bad. God alone sees who does wrong. He punishes him. Who are we to judge?’ Gandhi (343)
- ‘There is real ahimsa in defending my wife and children even at the risk of striking down the wrongdoer. It is perfect ahimsa not to strike him but intervene to receive his blows.’ Gandhi (375)
- ‘It is no exaggeration to say that I experience wave after wave of joy from the practice of self-restraint which such work requires. One will find true happiness in the measure that one understands this and lives accordingly.’ Gandhi (380-381)
- ‘it is not regard for the calf that in my illness prevents me from taking milk, but I have taken a definite vow not to take milk or its products even in illness and I fell that it is better to die than to break a vow knowingly and deliberately taken. Every consequence that I am taking today was before me when I took the vow.’ Gandhi (382)
- ‘Now, instead of going to Delhi, it remains to me to offer Satyagraha against our people, and as it is my determination to offer Satyagraha even unto death for securing the withdrawal of the Rowlatt legislation, I think the occasion has arrived when I should offer Satyagraha against ourselves for the violence that has occurred. And I shall do so at the sacrifice of my body, so long as we do not keep perfect peace and cease from violence to person and property.’ Gandhi (389)
- ‘He started a three-day fast and asked every Ahmedabadi to contribute to a fund for the families of the Englishmen who had been killed or wounded… Yet he acknowledged that the Satyagraha movement needed a harder and more disciplined core of expert volunteers: his, he said, had been a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’. ’ (389)
- ‘In a period when proud statesmen could speak of a ‘war to end war’, when the super-policemen of Versailles could bathe in the glory of a peace that would make ‘the world safe for democracy’; when the revolutionaries in Russia could entertain the belief that terror could initiate an eventual ‘withering away of the State’ – during that same period, one man in India confronted the world with the strong suggestion that a new political instrument, endowed with a new kind of religious fervor, may yet provide man with a choice.’ (391)
- ‘In 1920, finally, the Mahatma assumed political leadership.’ (392)
- ‘What is true now will, if not attended to, never be true again; and what is untrue now will never, by any trick, become true later.’ (399)
- ‘[At the end of Gandhi’s life] at night he at times suffered from severe attacks of shivering; and he would ask some of his middle-aged women helpers to ‘cradle’ him between them for bodily warmth.’ (404)
- ‘I suggested that (ethically speaking) a man should act in such a way that he actualizes both in himself and in the other such forces as are ready for a heightened morality. Nothing I have read or heard since has dissuaded me from the conviction that one may interpret Gandhi’s truth in these terms.’ (413)
- ‘As we saw, the essential preliminary steps in any of Gandhi’s campaigns were an objective investigation of facts, followed by a sincere attempt at arbitration.’ (414)
- ‘An action committee created for this purpose would select such forms of non-cooperation – strike, boycott, civil disobedience – as would seem fitting as the minimum force necessary to reach a defined goal.’ (415)
- ‘[Fasting] cannot be resorted to against those who regard us as their enemy, or on whose love we have not established a claim by dint of selfless service; it cannot be resorted to by a person who has not identified himself with, or worked for the cause he is fasting for; it cannot be used for gaining a material selfish end, or to change the honestly held opinion of another or in support of an issue that is not clear, feasible, and demonstrably just… To be legitimate, a fast should be capable of response.’ Pyarelal, The Right and Wrong Uses of Fasting: How Gandhi’s Standards Apply Today (417)
- ‘In submit, then, that Gandhi, in his immense intuition for historical actuality and his capacity to assume leadership in ‘truth and action’, may have created a ritualization through which men, equipped with both realism and spiritual strength, can face each other with a mutual confidence analogous to the instinctive safety built into the animals’ pacific rituals.’ (433)
- ‘…‘three essentials’: prayer, spinning, and writing a diary.’ (445)
- ‘the Mahatma was then over sixty, but twelve miles a day for twenty-four days was ‘child’s play’.’ (446)
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