“I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don’t think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.”

It’s a good time for black people to be alive.

If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band’s lead singer, Eric Burdon. “So you’re the honky,” she said, “who stole my song and got a hit out of it?

My name sounds French but that’s just a stage name.

How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.

Funk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.

Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

What is love but a prelude to sorrow with heartache ahead for your goal.

Music is an art and art has its own rules.

I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs and good ones.

I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.

My love is like the wind and wild is the wind. Give me more than one caress, satisfy my hungriness. Let the wind blow through your heart for wild is the wind.

I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.

If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.

Trees are living beings. And they have their own personalities. There are the young, eager saplings, all striving with each other. If you put your cheek against one of those, you almost sense the sap rising and the energy.

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.

There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

When you shoot right and truth and justice down, the more right and truth and justice will rise up.

The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind.