Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play it is free will.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.

Jawaharlal Nehru
It is only too easy to make suggestions and later try to escape the consequences of what we say.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.

Jawaharlal Nehru
There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Remember always that there not so very much difference between various people as we seem to imagine. Maps and atlases show us countries in different colors. Undoubtedly people do differ from one another, but they resemble each other also a great deal, and it is well to keep this in mind and not misled by colors on the map or by national boundaries.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Loyal and efficient work in a great cause, even though it may not be immediately recognized, ultimately bears fruit.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Often in history we see that religion, which was meant to raise us and make us better and nobler, has made people behave like beasts. Instead of bringing enlightenment of them, it has often tried to keep them in the dark; instead of broadening their minds, it has frequently made them narrow-minded and intolerant of others.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Blood and tears are going to be our lot, whether we like them or not. Our blood and tears will flow; maybe the parched soil of India needs them so that the fine flower of freedom may grow again.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Those who are prepared to die for any cause are seldom defeated.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Logic and cold reason are poor weapons to fight fear and distrust. Only faith and generosity can overcome them.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

Jawaharlal Nehru
For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it's great books, the "Upnishads", and the "Bhagavad Gita".

Jawaharlal Nehru
Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

Jawaharlal Nehru
I may lose many things including my temper, but I do not lose my nerve.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Essentially I am interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or future life. Whether there is such a thing as soul, or whether there is survival after death or not, I do not know; and important as these questions are, they do not trouble me the least.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Obviously, the highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.

Jawaharlal Nehru
At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.
Immediately prior to Independence

Jawaharlal Nehru
I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West … Out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways … I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes I have an exile's feeling.

Jawaharlal Nehru
After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.
In conversation with Lord Swinton

Jawaharlal Nehru
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.

Jawaharlal Nehru
We talk about a secular state in India. It is perhaps not very easy even to find a good word in Hindi for "secular". Some people think it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is that it is state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; that, as a state, it does not allow itself to be attached to one faith or religion, which then becomes the state religion.

Jawaharlal Nehru