Martin Luther King Jr.

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

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

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

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

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

If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

The quickest way to become troubled is to be concerned with what people are gonna say about your life and your work.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Wake up, you’ve been sleeping. Take up your bed and walk. Stop blaming other people. Oh, it’s nobody else’s fault.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.