“Don’t live life anyhow, else you get anywhere. Plan your life somehow and you can get somewhere. A slow plan is better than no plan.”

“In searching for ways to bridge the generation gap, there is no doubt that we, as parents, will have to practice what we preach, by striving more to bring our conduct into line with our code of beliefs.”

“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.”

“It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness.”

“Everything yields to diligence”

“Be thou glad sleeper and thy sorrow offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure.”

“Evil is the absence of God.”

“I am not more gifted than anybody else. I am just more curious than the average person and I will not give up a problem until I have found the proper solution.”

“It’s not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.”

“You radiate and generate more goodness for yourself; when you're aware of all you have”

“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”

“Sex, alone, is a mighty urge to action, but its forces are like a cyclone—they are often uncontrollable. When the emotion of love begins to mix itself with the emotion of sex, the result is calmness of purpose, poise, accuracy of judgment, and balance

“A problem can't be solved with the same level of thinking that created it.”

*"Splendid if I overcome My earthy passion, But if I succeed not, Still I have known happiness!”

“When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.”