Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born on 2nd October 1869. He was a man of ethics, who was committed to and deployed nonviolent resistance to run the most victorious campaign for India's independence from the British rule. He was a lawyer and an anti-colonial nationalist. He had expressed his resistance towards a socio-political atmosphere which was violent, discriminatory, exploitive, and tragic. That Gandhi's contribution to India's Freedom Movement is momentous, is beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The Gandhis belonged to the Bania caste, who were originally grocers, but his forefathers have been the Prime Minister of numerous Kathiawar states. Uttamchand Gandhi, alias Ota Gandhi was Mahatma Gandhi's grandfather who was also a man of principle. He was a Divan at Porbandar but was compelled by the state to leave the place. He then sought refuge in Junagadh. Ota Gandhi used to salute the British with the left hand. When someone noticed this disrespectful courtesy and asked for an explanation, he simply said that his right hand was already pledged to Porbandar.
Mahatma Gandhi's father, Karamchand Gandhi, was also truthful, generous, courageous, but short-tempered. He had always loved his clan and his loyalty to the state was widely known. He never had any ambition or interest in acquiring wealth, so his family was left with very little property.
Gandhi has always seen his mother wrapped up in all the goodness the world has to offer. She was deeply religious and had a strong common sense. She was well informed about all the affairs of the state and everyone thought highly of her intellect.
Gandhi got married to Kasturbai at the age of thirteen. He never even dreamt of criticizing his father for having him married at such an early age.
In earlier times, when the elders of a family decided to get their children married, it was not out of any thought of welfare, but mostly because of their convenience and economy. He further explains that marriage among the Hindus is not a simple subject. The parents of the bride and the bridegroom would constantly interfere in the union, trying to outdo the other in terms of how much money they could spend. They would waste their time and money over the preparations for the wedding.
Gandhi used to follow the little pamphlets which used to discuss the issue of child marriage, conjugal love, thrift, and
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- “Yet even differences prove helpful, where there are tolerance, charity and truth.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the man nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “With some, fasting is of no avail, because assuming that mechanical fasting alone will make them immune, they keep their bodies without food, but feast their minds upon all sorts of delicacies, thinking all the while what they will eat and what they will drink after the fast terminates.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Nothing once begun should be abandoned unless it is proved to be morally wrong.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “It is my faith, based on experience, that if one’s heart is pure, calamity brings in its train men and measures to fight it.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “If all had the same belief about all matters of religion, there would be only one religion in the world.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “But you can wake a man only if he is really asleep; no effort that you may make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending sleep.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “The physical in man reacts to the psychological”.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The golden rule is to act fearlessly and with single-minded devotion to the task at hand.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Truth is the most powerful weapon we have.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- It is health that is the real wealth, and not pieces of gold and silver.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The future depends on what you do today.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Each one has to find his peace from within.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- There is no God higher than truth.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The best way to predict your future is to create it.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- In a gentle way you can shake the world.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Courage is the discovery that you may not win, and trying when you know you can lose.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- The future depends on what you do today.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- My life is my message.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “What barrier is there that love cannot break?”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “But you can wake a man only if he is really asleep. No effort that you make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending sleep.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Men often become what they believe themselves to be.If I believe I cannot do something,it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can , then I acquire the ability to do it even If I didn't have it in the beginning".”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world... It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. for we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in selfsuffering.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Our duty is very simple and plain. We want to serve the community, and in our own humble way to serve the Empire. We believe in the righteousness of the cause, which it is our privilege to espouse. We have an abiding faith in the mercy of the Almighty God, and we have firm faith in the British Constitution. That being so, we should fail in our duty if we wrote anything with a view to hurt.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “There are innumerable definitions of God, because His manifestations are innumerable.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “I have called her beautiful, because it was her moral beauty that at once attracted me. True beauty after all consists in purity of heart.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “No matter how explicit the pledge, people will turn and twist the text to suit their own purpose”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- “Truthis like a vast tree, which yields more and more fruit, the more you nurture it”
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
In the summary of The Story of My Experiments with Truth book, there are 17 key lessons. These lessons include: