“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody

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.

You may just be my new beginning or the absolute end of me.

The older you get the more you appreciate being home doing absolutely nothing.

A quiet mind in a state of peace can do absolutely everything.

You are your own responsibility. You belong to absolutely no one else.

Give yourself space to do absolutely nothing and just acknowledge your inner strength.

Each experience in your life was absolutely necessary in order to have gotten you to the next place, and the next place, up to this very moment.

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.