— Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, 1931
About this quote
हिन्दी में
कमज़ोर कभी क्षमा नहीं कर सकता; क्षमा बलवान का गुण है।
What it means
The line makes forgiveness a capacity rather than a concession. To forgive is to give up a claim you could have pressed, so it is available only to someone who could have pressed it; on this reading, an inability to let something go is a symptom, not a principle. Never is doing real work too — this is offered as a rule about the weak, not a tendency.
Its use is that it reverses the usual social coding, in which holding a grudge looks like self-respect and forgiving looks like being unable to hit back. The misuse follows directly from the same words: turned into pressure, it becomes ‘if you were strong you would have let this go’, which inverts the claim, because forgiveness that was never optional is not forgiveness at all.
What it teaches you
Before you call something forgiveness, check whether you genuinely had the option to press the matter — the complaint you could have filed, the payment you could have withheld, the thing you could have said in front of others — and are declining it. If no such option existed, what you have is avoidance, and naming it accurately saves you from expecting the relief that forgiving actually brings. The line’s fair use is the other direction: when someone cannot stop relitigating an old injury, read it as information about their strength rather than as a reason to push them.
अर्थ और सीख
क्षमा यहाँ दया नहीं, सामर्थ्य है — जो बदला ले सकता था और नहीं लेता, वही क्षमा करता है; न कर पाना कमज़ोरी की निशानी बताया गया है। इसीलिए यह वाक्य पीड़ित पर दबाव डालने के लिए नहीं है — ‘ताक़तवर होते तो भूल जाते’ कहना इसका उलटा अर्थ है। पहले देखिए कि हिसाब चुकाने की ताक़त आपके पास थी या नहीं; न हो तो जो हो रहा है वह क्षमा नहीं, बचाव है।
Where it comes from
Genuine Gandhi — from Young India (1931): ‘The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.’ One of his most quoted and, unusually, most accurately quoted lines.
