“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before.

Before you get married you should meet your fiance’s parents. It is not enough that you like his parole officer.

Long before many of us were even conscious of our own degradation, these men [Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois] fought for African national and racial equality.

If your husband wants to lick the beaters on the mixer, shut them off before you give them to him.

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.

Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice.