“I believe that any man’s life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high-water mark of pure and useful living.”

You may fill your heads with knowledge or skillfully train your hands, but unless it is based upon high, upright character, upon a true heart, it will amount to nothing. You will be no better than the most ignorant.

Success always leaves footprints.

Holding a grudge does not hurt the person against whom the grudge is held, it hurts the one who holds it.

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker… there is no escape… people drag others or lift others up.

You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.

Political activity alone cannot make a man free. Back of the ballot, he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your ‘civilization’.

In proportion as one renders service he becomes great.

From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not keep the world from what it wants.

The time will come when the Negro in the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to.

If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.

It is dangerous and unbelievably fast and entirely different from the kind of track I am used to racing on.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

People often ask me whether I believe in God. I haven’t seen God. But I think that one’s beliefs are one’s God – and, in those terms, yes, God is there.

A man lives by believing something.

When we doubt, it increases. when we believe, it increases too. And that depends on you, with whom you want to go with?

I’m a believer in fate and in fulfilling your destiny. I’ve always had a kind of inner voice that I have learned to listen to.

Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasn’t complicated. ‘I speak; you believe My word; your son will be fine.’ We complicate what God has made simple by seeing the world through human eyes. We want to see in order to believe and presume that our limitations are His.

I don’t believe in playing around much with suit cuts. I like a fairly classic shape that gives a man strong shoulders, a fitted waist, and long legs. Classic simplicity always works.