Browse Quotes

“Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.”

“The highest result of education is tolerance.”

“It all comes to this: the simplest way to be happy is to do good.”

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.”

“No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

“Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.”

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

“Example is the best lesson there is.”

“There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”

“One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short.”

“Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.”

“It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”

“In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”

“Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.”

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

“The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.”

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed.”

“You may never know what results come of your actions. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

“There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”

“Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men. The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

“Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.”

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert — alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life.”

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

“The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

“There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

“When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world.”

“The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.”

“Let the nation try justice and the problem will be solved.”

“What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.”

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

“I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.”

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

“To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.”

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

“Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”

“I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”

“If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.”

“An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

“The time is always right to do what's right.”

“We must all learn to live together as brothers — or we will all perish together as fools.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

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

“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”