“I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Cheap little rhymes A cheap little tune Are sometimes as dangerous As a sliver of the moon.

There’s a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred.

The calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss.

I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head– So I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables.

I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind.

Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you– But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.

We are all a part of every person we have ever met.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.

There is no power or authority without responsibility, and he who accepts the one cannot escape or evade the other.

Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach.

You always told me that I was the child with one foot out the door. But, did you ever consider that it was for my own safety?

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.