Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

To possess both wisdom and compassion is the heart of our human revolution. If you have wisdom alone and lack compassion, it will be a cold, perverse wisdom. If you have compassion alone and lack wisdom, you cannot give happiness to others. You are even likely to lead them in the wrong direction, and you won't be able to achieve your own happiness.

In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts, which He also gave us.

People with high levels of personal mastery...cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.

One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it's like a battery: you've got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

I learned a long time ago that if you subscribe and believe the good, you have to believe the bad. My measure is my heart and what I know.

Find a balance between head and heart.

Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival.

Few things are needed to make a wise man happy; nothing can make a fool content; that is why most men are miserable.

Human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled; they are four dimensional - body, mind, heart, and spirit.

Some people will follow their minds without listening to their hearts, and others will follow their hearts without listening to their minds. This is why reason exists, for there to be balance between the heart and mind. We were not meant to follow the mind and ignore the heart. Instead, we were meant to follow the heart over the mind, but without completely abandoning logic. The middle way is the preferred way, and this path simply means to allow your heart to drive you, but do not forget to balance reason with your conscience.

The older I get, the more I realize the importance of exercising the various dimensions of my body, soul, mind, and heart. Taken together, these aspects give me a sense of wholeness. I want to be a whole human being rather than one who limps on one leg because I don't know how to use all of my parts. Intellectual, emotional, and physical activity are not separate entities. Rather, they are dimensions of the same human being.

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

When the heart is right, the mind and the body will follow.

Your mind must control, but you must have heart . . . . Give your feeling free.

Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

Human compassion is equal to human cruelty, and it is up to each of us to tip the balance.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself to be in the world as in a great, beautiful, noble, and valued whole, when harmonious ease affords him a pure and free delight, then the universe, if it could experience itself, would exult, as having attained its goal, and admire the climax of its own becoming and essence.

Intelligence comes into being when the mind, the heart and the body are really harmonious.

Becoming fully rational is not enough anymore; evidently it can lead to distortions of all the great human possibilities.

Nature will not forgive those who fail to fulfill the law of their being. The law of human beings is wisdom and goodness, not unlimited acquisition.

In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.