“I dream a world… where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!”

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.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

Never give up on something you love.

If you’re passionate about something then it will definitely work out for you.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.