“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”

No man is a devil in his own mind.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

Everybody’s journey is individual.

I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

What you do is proof of what you believe.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.

Commitment is a big part of what I am and what I believe.

Three rules: I do not eat too much; I do not worry too much; and, if I do my best, I believe that what happens, happens for the best.

I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

It is important to remember that we all have magic inside us.