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Satyagraha has been designed as an effective substitute for violence.
Sep 29, 2025
A satyagrahi exhausts all other means before he resorts to satyagraha.
Satyagraha thrives on repression till at last the repressor is tired of it and the object of satyagraha is gained.
The satyagrahi strives to reach reason through the heart. The method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion.
Satyagraha is itself an unmistakable mute prayer of an agonized soul.
Satyagraha, of which civil resistance is but a part, is to me the universal law of life.
The satyagrahi general has to obey his inner voice, for over and above the situation outside he examines himself constantly and listens to the dictates of the inner self.
Seeming failure is not of the law of satyagrahabut of incompetence of the satyagrahi by whatever cause induced.
The insistence on truthfulness does not disturb the freedom of the individual. The social obligation implied in Satyagraha turns the freedom of the individual into moral freedom. An atheist is free to say or to do what he likes, provided he does what he says and says what he does. So, in the context of social relations, the freedom of the individual is moral freedom.
A clear victory of satyagraha is impossible so long as there is ill will.
The satyagrahi should not have any hatred in his heart against the opponent.
Undoubtedly, prayer requires a living faith in God. Successful satyagraha is inconceivable without that faith.
My purpose is to describe experiments in the science ofsatyagraha and not at all to describe how good I am.
I have even seen the writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it.
The mantra of independence was Satyagraha. And the warriors were Satyagrahis. The mantra of New Age India must be Swachhagrah. And the warriors will be Swachhagrahis.
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
To be equitable, economic growth has to be sustainable. To be sustainable, economic growth has in turn to be all-inclusive. All-inclusive is no longer the greatest good of the greatest number. It is actually 'Sarvodaya' or the 'rise of all'. This Mahatma Gandhi saw as essential to Satyagraha itself.
The good man is the friend of all living things.
In the dictionary of satyagraha, there is no enemy.
Satyagraha is a relentless search for truth and a determination to search truth.
A satyagrahi has no other stay but God, and he who has any other stay or depends on any other help cannot offer satyagraha.
Satyagraha does not depend on outside help, it derives all its strength from within.
Jail-going is only the beginning, not the end of satyagraha. The acme of satyagraha for us would be to lay down our lives for the defence of India's just cause.
The word 'defeat' is not to be found in my dictionary, and everyone who is selected as a recruit in my army may be certain that there is no defeat for a satyagrahi.
A satyagrahi would neither retaliate nor would he submit to the criminal, but seek to cure him by curing himself.
Real suffering bravely borne, melts even a heart of stone. Such is the potency of suffering. And there lies the key to Satyagraha.
A satyagrahi must ceaselessly strive to realize and live truth. And he must never contemplate hurting anyone by thought, word or deed.
Violence is a concession to human weakness, satyagraha is an obligation.
Final Satyagraha is inconceivable without an honorable peace between the several communities composing the Indian nation.
Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.
In the code of the satyagrahi, there is no such thing as surrender to brute force.
A satyagrahi may not ride two horses, truth and untruth, at the same time, nor, to change the metaphor, trim his sail to catch every breeze as you do in the name of communism.
Non-co-operation and civil disobedience are but different branches of the same tree called satyagraha.
I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can only teach you not to bow your heads before any one even at the cost of your life.
For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
No police officer could compel a satyagrahi to give evidence against a person who has confessed to him. A satyagrahi would never be guilty of a betrayal of trust.
Whatever may be true of the other modes of warfare, insatyagraha it has been held that the causes for failure are to be sought within.
Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
To die without killing is the badge of a satyagrahi.
Satyagraha is an attribute of the spirit within.
Even as satyagraha is a weapon unique of its kind and not one of the ordinary weapons used by people, so is Khadi, a unique article of commerce which will not, cannot, succeed on terms common to other articles.
The fight of satyagraha is for the strong in spirit, not the doubter or the timid. Satyagraha teaches us the art of living as well as dying.
In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self.
For a satyagrahi brigade only those are eligible who believe in ahimsa and satya.
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
A satyagrahi is nothing if not instinctively law-abiding.
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