If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
There’s two things everybody got to find out for themselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing. And it’s different on every shore. And living… well… There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.
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. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey’s back.
Such as I am, I am a precious gift.
All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.
The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.
I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.
That is the way with people … If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.
It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say.
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
want won’t kill you half as quick as worry will.
We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
Bitterness is the coward’s revenge on the world for having been hurt.
Everybody has some special road of thought along which they travel when they are alone to themselves. And his road of thought is what makes every man what he is.
It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine–hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.
