“You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!”

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.

Our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.

I may do some good before I am dead–be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

The crow wished everything was black, the Owl, that everything was white.

Our elders said back then that if Black folks really wanted to see Change, they had to step up to the plate and do it themselves. Somebody has to be First. Will that be you?

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

And I can’t die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I’m a cracked plate.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see.

Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.

I have black friends, but I don’t just hang out with black kids. I might pull up with Indian kids, white kids, black kids, whatever.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.