Life & Mortality Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi frames courage as a discipline, not a craving. The line balances on a razor: it sanctifies the willingness to suffer for a cause while warning that the desire to suffer can become its own form of ego. In a political culture that often lionizes sacrifice, he’s setting a moral booby trap for the would-be hero: if you want martyrdom, you’ve already contaminated it.

The intent is strategic as much as spiritual. Gandhi’s campaigns depended on mass participation in nonviolent resistance, where arrest, beatings, and even death were real possibilities. He needed people steady enough to face that risk without turning the movement into a theater of self-immolation. “Be brave enough” is recruitment language; “lust” is the red flag. He’s telling followers to keep their motives clean because motives shape tactics. A hunger for martyrdom can push activists toward reckless confrontation, romanticize death over patient organizing, and hand the oppressor an easy propaganda win: look how irrational these people are, how eager for chaos.

The subtext is also a critique of moral vanity. Martyrdom is culturally potent precisely because it’s supposed to be involuntary - a consequence endured, not a prize pursued. By using the word “lust,” Gandhi makes the desire sound bodily and suspect, something that hijacks judgment. He insists that nonviolence isn’t passive purity; it’s controlled power, a refusal to let hatred - or self-glorification - write the script.

In an era of nationalist fervor and colonial brutality, the line functions like a safeguard: embrace the costs, reject the spectacle.