— Martin Luther King Jr., sermons of the 1960s; anthologised in A Testament of Hope
About this quote
हिन्दी में
हमें सीमित निराशाओं को स्वीकार करना होगा, पर असीम आशा को कभी नहीं खोना चाहिए।
What it means
The sentence works by pairing two mismatched quantities. Disappointment is called finite — it has an edge, a size, an end — while hope is called infinite, which puts the two on different scales rather than in competition. The verbs are matched to the scales: disappointment gets accept, an act you perform and are done with; hope gets never lose, a holding action with no end date.
It is usually quoted as encouragement to stay positive, which quietly drops the first half. The line does not say the disappointments are illusory, or setbacks that will turn out fine anyway; it instructs you to take them, in full, as real. What it refuses is only the step where one specific defeat gets promoted into a verdict on whether the whole thing was ever possible.
What it teaches you
When something fails, state the size of the failure out loud — this application, this campaign, this year — and then check whether you have already rewritten it as this never works. Accepting the first sentence costs you the thing you lost; accepting the second costs you everything you were going to try next.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति दो चीज़ों को अलग-अलग तराज़ू पर रखती है: निराशा की एक सीमा होती है, आशा की नहीं। इसलिए किसी एक हार को पूरा-पूरा स्वीकार करना ज़रूरी है — उसे झूठा या मामूली बताना नहीं — मगर उस हार से यह नतीजा निकाल लेना गलत है कि काम ही असंभव है। सबक यही है: हार को उसके असली नाप में गिनो, और उसे आगे की सारी कोशिशों का फ़ैसला बनने से रोको।
Where it comes from
Genuine Martin Luther King Jr. — the line appears in his sermons of the 1960s and is anthologised in A Testament of Hope. It is his theology of endurance in a single sentence.
