It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.
I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.
No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
Such as I am, I am a precious gift.
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.
Silence is all the genius a fool has.
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
Faith hasn’t got no eyes, but she’s long-legged.
Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.
It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say.
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.
Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.
It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.
Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.