“I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head– So I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.”

That Justice is a blind goddess Is a thing to which we black are wise: Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes.

Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.

The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

There is no color line in art.

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Road’s in front o’ me, Nothin’ to do but walk.

I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

In love, we have to dare everything if we really love.

We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.

No one dare disturb the sound of silence.

Here is he laid to whom for daring deed, nor friend nor foe could render worthy meed.

Know thyself as the pride of His creation, the link uniting divinity and matter; behold a part of God Himself within thee; remember thine own dignity nor dare descend to evil or meanness.

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.