Look at my life. I'm floating like mercury around the earth. My footprints shine with stardust. All because I love you. All because you love me.

Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free. A Brave and Startling Truth.

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love's light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

Love recognizes no barriers.

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.

Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

The honorary duty of a human being is to love.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

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 never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams.

Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.

If a human being dreams a great dream, dares to love somebody; if a human being dares to be Martin King, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or Malcolm X; if a human being dares to be bigger than the condition into which she or he was born-it means so can you. And so you can try to stretch, stretch, stretch yourself so you can internalize, 'Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.' That's one thing I'm learning.

Its not where your dreams take you, its where you take your dreams.

Lift up your eyes upon This day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men, Take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts Each new hour holds new chances For a new beginning.

I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.

Violence is not power, but the absence of power.

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Go put your creed into the deed, nor speak with double tongue.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

Dare to let your dreams reach beyond you.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave

A person is the product of their dreams. So make sure to dream great dreams. And then try to live your dream.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.

I, with millions of other Americans, have the same dream Martin Luther King Jr. had; when I wake up I wish some of the things I dreamt would be true. I wish that little black and white boys and girls would hold hands without being shocked at their nearness to each other and say in a natural way, "we have overcome.

The honorary duty of a human being is to love.

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.

Nothing will work unless you do.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

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, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. 

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. 

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.