“Strong enough to make holes in the rock are tiny drops of water that persist to fall. Persistence is the attitude that breaks down mountains one rock at a time!”

“Never leave your life plan to be determined by people who are not going where you are going. For the sake of your dreams and also for the sake of the people God created to benefit from your God-give talents, stay away from toxic people. Mount the shoulder giants and see farther ahead!”

“How does a person become productive? Find your strength and then find someone who needs your strength.”

“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.”

“Discipline is what you must have to resist the lure of excuses”

“affliction was not a liability, but an asset of great value.”

“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”

“We can get excited by thinking about what all we have or can have, OR we can get discouraged by thinking about what all we don't have.”

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.”

“Is there any real purpose in being alive if all we are going to do is get up every day and live only for ourselves? Live your life to help others. Give & live selflessly.” 

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

“No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“When the family is destroyed, society eventually disintegrates.”

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”