“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.”

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.

Money and art are far apart.

Gather up In the arms of your love—Those who expect No love from above.

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.

I wish the rent Was heaven sent.

A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung. To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven.

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.

Gather quickly Out of darkness All the songs you know And throw them at the sun Before they melt Like snow.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.

A dream without a goal, and without action, has no opportunity to come true.

I hope my story inspires everyone out there to keep hustling and chasing their dreams.

You float underneath my eyelids – a dream I never seem to get enough of.

People will give you a million reasons why your dreams are crazy. Ignore anyway.  

Live and dream. In a sweet, but invented by you paradise.

The places that ive been, the things that i have seen – what you have as nightmares, are what i have as dreams.

I must have loved you before, in another life, beyond a dream, across centuries.

We are never too late to start working on our dreams.