“When someone is rude, keep a smile on your face. When you stay on the high road and keep your joy, you take away their power."

“We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.” 

“Loosers want it but only through the easy way. If action taking were like reading a story book, loosers would only love to open the picture pages”

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”

“Give a smile always, not once a while. Life's great when you wake up and ignore the scaring nightmares you had. Forget the bitter bile; life's sweet beyond River Nile. File your teeth out and smile!”

“it’s easy to forget that the pursuit of happiness is not what life is about. Only as we remember that life is a test, a trust, and a temporary assignment will the appeal of these things lose their grip on our lives. We are preparing for something even better. “The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.”

“I know for sure that you cannot give to everyone else and not give back to yourself. You will end up empty, or at best, less than what you can be for yourself and your family and your work. Replenish the well of yourself, for yourself.”

“If you have been trying to limit God—stop it! Don’t try to confine Him or His works to any single place or sphere. You wouldn’t try to limit the ocean.”

“Through their deeds, the dead of battle have spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could. But we can only honor them by rededicating ourselves to the cause for which they gave a last full measure of devotion. ”

“It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.  This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“A few years ago, honesty was the hallmark of a man of good character. But it’s been set aside for an “It’s all right if you don’t get caught” philosophy.”

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

“My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.”