Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

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

We bust build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

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

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

Our own life has to be our message.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.