Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

Written in English for Young India on 11 August 1920, days after Gandhi launched the non-co-operation campaign against British rule. Answering letters that urged him to permit violence, or suspected him of secretly planning it, he says that where the only choice is between cowardice and violence he would advise violence, and would rather India took up arms to defend her honour than remained a helpless witness to her own dishonour; but that non-violence is infinitely superior, and forgiveness means something only when there is the power to punish. He does not believe India, or himself, to be helpless, and wants to use that strength for a better purpose; the sentences follow, and he goes on to argue that a hundred thousand Englishmen need not frighten three hundred million Indians.

Strength is a matter of will, not of bodily force: a people that does not fear can resist without arms, and its non-violence is then a choice made from strength, not weakness.

Shared as a fitness or self-help motto about willpower. In the article it is a political argument: Gandhi is telling a people who felt powerless that they could refuse co-operation without violence, and that the non-violence he asked for was that of the strong, not a cover for cowardice, which he says he would like less than violence.

The next sentences, illustrating the point, make a sweeping generalisation about Zulus and their fear of an English boy’s revolver, of a kind common in Gandhi’s writing of those years.

• Mahatma Gandhi, 1920: In the same article, just before: non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment, but abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish.

Power, Politics, Courage, Wisdom

• Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
• Pessimism and the natural instinct to raise hell are not mutually exclusive. Frank Zappa
• It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. André Gide
• He who fears death will never act as becomes a living man. Seneca the Younger

• archive.org/details/youngindia19191900maha (Young India 1919–1922, Madras: S. Ganesan, 1924, pp. 259–260, page images)
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi (‘The Doctrine Of The Sword (1920)’, Young India, 11 August 1920)

Mahatma Gandhi, Articles in Indian Opinion, Young India and Harijan (1920), ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’, Young India, 11 August 1920 (Young India 1919–1922, Madras: S. Ganesan, 1924, p. 260). Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/strength-does-not-come-from-physical-capacity/ (23 October 2026).

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