It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say.
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.
It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.
The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.
But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.
I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.
She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.
It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.
Don’t you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it’s in the sea, and it’s homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.
No man may make another free.
It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.