Martin Luther King Jr.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

I am the captain of my soul.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all.

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.