It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
Women forget all the things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget.
No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.
Mystery is the essence of divinity.
You got to go there to know there.
Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.
It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.
Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey’s back.
Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don’t know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!
I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.
You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.
Magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.
If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?
I have a strong suspicion. that much that passes for constant love is a golded- up moment walking in its sleep.
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.
To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.
If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.
Africa has her mouth on Moses.