Top 120 Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Travel Quotes

2. “To be successful in life what you need is education.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

3. “You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

4. “Most things, except agriculture, can wait.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

5. “Success often comes to those who dare to act. It seldom goes to the timid who are ever afraid of the consequences.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

6. “Children are like buds in a garden and should be carefully and lovingly nurtured, as they are the future of the nation and the citizens of tomorrow.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

7. “Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

8. “The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

9. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

10. “Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

11. “Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

12. “Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

13. “Ignorance is always afraid of change.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

14. “Do not advise too much: do the job yourself. This is the only advice you can give to others. Do it and others will follow.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

15. “The Bhagavad Gita deals essentially with the spiritual foundation of human existence. It is a call of action to meet the obligations and duties of life; yet keeping in view the spiritual nature and grander purpose of the universe.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

16. “The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

17. “The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

Featured in: Virtue Quotes

18. “Peace is not merely an absence of war. It is also a state of mind.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

19. “Every little thing counts in a crisis.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

20. “Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

21. “The Ganga to me is the symbol of India’s memorable past which has been flowing into the present and continues to flow towards the ocean of the future.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

22. “Poverty anywhere is a danger to prosperity everywhere.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

23. “Play the hand you’re dealt.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

24. “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.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

25. “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

26. “What we really are matters more than what other people think of us.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

27. “Citizenship consists in the service of the country.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

28. “You don’t change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

29. “There is nothing more horrifying than stupidity in action.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

30. “At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

31. “Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

32. “A country is known by the way it treats its animals.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

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

— Jawaharlal Nehru

34. “Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

35. “A tyrst with destiny – A the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and Freedom.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

36. “What we need is a generation of peace.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

37. “Evil unchecked grows, evil tolerated poisons the whole system.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

38. “A great disaster is a symbol to us to remember all the big things of life and forget the small things, of which we have thought too much.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

39. “We can’t encourage narrow mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

40. “Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

41. “In the name of religion many great and fine deeds have been performed. In the name of religion also, thousands and millions have been killed, and every possible crime has been committed.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

42. “A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

43. “The boundaries of democracy have to be widened so as to include economic equality also. This is the great revolution through which we are all passing.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

44. “Those who boast are seldom the great.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

45. “I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

46. “Please remember that law and sense are not always the same.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

47. “I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

48. “What is history, indeed, but a record of change?”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

49. “Let us be a little humble; let us think that the truth may not perhaps be entirely with us.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

50. “The basic fact of today is the tremendous pace of change in human life.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru