No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked
“A French philosopher said, ‘No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.’ The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. 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. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that the truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.” – Martin Luther King Jr. From “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart”