I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
Mental inertia is death.
It is not safe in the republican form of government that clannishness should exist either by compulsory or voluntary reason. It is not good for the government and it is not good for the individual.
Our history in this country dates from the moment that restless men among us became restless under oppression and rose against it. . . Agitation, contentions, ceaseless unrest, constant aspiring -- a race so moved must prevail.
Ours is supposed to be a government in which classes and distinctions melt into a harmonious whole. Until we reach this ideal of government, we will be a distracted, contentious people.
We must learn to lean upon ourselves; we must learn to plan and execute business enterprises of our own; we must learn to venture our pennies if we would gain dollars.
I do not inveigh against higher education, I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of, is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done.
You puff the poets of other days, The living you deplore. Spare me the accolade: your praise Is not worth dying for.
And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.
The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter. . . you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.