“One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Courage faces fear and thereby masters it”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“This faith transforms the whirlwind of despair into a warm and reviving breeze of hope. The words of a motto which a generation ago were commonly found on the wall in the homes of devout persons need to be etched on our hearts:
Fear knocked at the door.
Faith answered.
There was no one there.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says “Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else? The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deals with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralysing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“On the parable of the Good Samaritan: "I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“My friends, we cannot win the respect of the white people of the South or elsewhere if we are willing to trade the future of our children for our personal safety or comfort. Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. ... 'Put up thy sword.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble. ...truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“The greatness of our God lies in the fact that [He] is both tough minded and tender hearted. ... [God] expresses [His] tough mindedness in [His] justice and wrath and [His] tenderheartedness in [His] love and grace. ... On the one hand, God is a God of justice who punished Israel for her wayward deeds, and on the other hand, [He] is a forgiving father whose heart was filled with unutterable joy when the prodigal son returned home.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. Who doubts that this toughness is one of man's greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
Martin Luther King Jr.
Born place: in Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
Born date January 15, 1929
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“Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Invisible Monsters
“It was the kind of day that glittered and beckoned like a foretaste of heaven. The snow no longer fell, but lay thick and silver-white on the ground. The sun dazzled and the sky was a rich, celestial blue. On such a day as this, the whole world might change.”
― Tracy Rees, quote from Amy Snow
“Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Partners in Crime
“As with most situations in my life, Emery's dress was much harder to get out of than it had been to get into.”
― Hester Browne, quote from The Little Lady Agency
“I fear we face a new kind of man along with this new kind of affluence. When lands meant wealth, men could perhaps have enough. Too much land was difficult to govern. But with paper money, more is simply more. In France, you know, where they suffer from their own financial mania, they have a word - the millionaire - to denote men whose wealth is measured in the millions. Millions. It is inconceivable, but there are more than a few men who hold this title.”
― David Liss, quote from A Conspiracy of Paper
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