“I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries.”

Later, I discovered there was a lot of work to being good in tennis.

I don’t want to be remembered for my tennis accomplishments.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

We must believe in the power of education. We must respect just laws. We must love ourselves, our old and or young, our women as well as our men.

A couple of times a day I sit quietly and visualize my body fighting the AIDS virus. It’s the same as me sitting and seeing myself hit the perfect serve. I did that often when I was an athlete.

When we were together, I loved you deeply and you gave me so much happiness I can never repay you.

One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

Life is like a tennis game. You can’t win without serving.

I spent many, many hours in libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were.

Wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on.

I take the good with the bad, and I try to face them both with as much calm and dignity as I can muster.

We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.

The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.

In America you’re conditioned to regard everything as a contest. You have to make the Ten Best Dressed List, win this, win that. It drives me nuts sometimes. Who cares, for Christ’s sake?

Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

The concept of the black and white people boils down to: No light without darkness – You depend on each other!

I believe that all men, black and brown, and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

There is a terrific apprehension among some people that blacks will take over the sport… It will create problems because their behavior, speech and dress is just a completely different culture.

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom.