Take the blinders from your visiontake the padding from your earsand confess you’ve heard me crying and admit you’ve seen my tears.

First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

I can be changed by what happened to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are...

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I’m with you kid. Let’s go.’

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‘leaders’ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‘No. No, I’m finished. Bye.’ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I...

What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.

Caged BirdA free bird leaps on the back of the windand floats downstream till the current endsand dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.But a bird that stalks...

It is by observation that in the future they will not remember what you said, they will not remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel.

Love. And again, see I don’t mean, I think love is that condition in the human spirit so profund, that it allows us to forgive, and it may be the energy which keeps the stars...

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‘Run like hell and all of fire.’ You don’t want modesty, you want humility.

I’m a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I’m even afraid of it – it’s a learned affectation and it’s just stuck on me like decals. Now...

I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your...

Nothing will work unless you do.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage...

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could...

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors,...

In a long meter hymn, a singer – they call it ‘lays out a line.’ And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight,...

This bed yawnsbeneath the weightof our absent selves.

We, unaccustomed to courageexiles from delightlive coiled in shells of lonelinessuntil love leaves its high holy templeand comes into our sightto liberate us into life.Love arrivesand in its train come ecstasiesold memories of pleasureancient histories...

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.

remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned…you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don’t anybody raise you from the way you have...

I am a WomanPhenomenally.Phenomenal Woman,that’s me.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m...

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents...

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, ‘I’m not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.’ Timidity keeps people from their good. They...

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country’s table but by ingenuity and courage is...

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.(Popular misquote of “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not...

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.