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

An inch of progress is worth more than a yard of complaint.

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.

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.

How we use the knowledge we gain determines our progress on earth, in space or on the moon. Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

In my studies of astronomy and philosophy I hold this opinion about the universe, that the Sun remains fixed in the centre of the circle of heavenly bodies, without changing its place; and the Earth, turning upon itself, moves round the Sun.

My happiness is my reflection on the suffering during my journey and knowing that I never quit nor was I guided by anybody on this earth.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

The sun is always shining. We have oxygen, trees, birds. There’s so much good things on Earth, still. We haven’t destroyed everything.

Angels on earth exist I know it.

I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth.

The company of the saints helps us to recognize that God never abandons us, so that we can live and bear witness to hope on this earth.