doing what everybody could do but doesn't

Gandhi was a strong individual, and his strength lay in the richness of his personality, not in the multitude of his possessions. His goal was To be, not To have. Happiness came to him through self-realization. Fearing nothing, he could live the truth. Having nothing, he could pay for his principles.

Mahatma Gandhi is the symbol of personal morality and public action. When conscience dwells at home but not in the workshop, office, classroom and marketplace, the road is wide open to corruption and cruelty and dictatorship.

Gandhi enriched politics with ethics. He faced each morning's issues in the light of eternal and universal values. He always distilled a permanent element out of the ephemeral. Gandhi thus broke through the framework of usual assumptions which cramp a man's action. he discovered a new dimension of action. Unconfined by considerations of personal success or comfort, he spilt the social atom and found a new source of energy. It gave him weapons of attack against which there was no defence. His greatness lay in doing what everybody could do but doesn't.

'Perhaps he will not succeed,' Tagore wrote of the living Gandhi. 'Perhaps he will fail as the Buddha failed and as the Christ failed to wean men from their iniquities, but he will always be remembered as one who made his life a lesson for all ages to come,'

The Life Of Mahatma Gandhi - Louis Fischer