Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
The good man is the friend of all living things.
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.
Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupation is exhilarating and life giving.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Unlike the animal, God has given man the faculty of reason.
As for food, India has plenty of fertile land, there is enough water and no dearth of man power… The public should be educated to become self reliant. Once they know that they have got to stand on their own legs, it would electrify the atmosphere.
The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum-total of that life is God.
I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth.
I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.
I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.
Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man’s supremacy over lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man. They had also brought out the truth that man eats not for enjoyment but to live.
Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.
When I see a cow, it is not an animal to eat, it is a poem of pity for me and I worship it and I shall defend its worship against the whole world.
The basis of my vegetarianism is not physical, but moral. If anybody said that I should die if I did not take beef tea or mutton, even on medical advice, I would prefer death. That is the basis of my vegetarianism.
Every man has an equal right to the necessaries of life even as birds and beasts have.
I submit that scientists have not yet explored the hidden possibilities of the innumerable seeds, leaves and fruits for giving the fullest possible nutrition to mankind.
To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.
Cow-slaughter and man-slaughter are in my opinion two sides of the same coin.
