“Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.” 

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known.

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.

Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

“You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.” 

“He was whipped oftener who was whipped easiest.” 

“How do you feel," said a friend to me, "when you are hooted and jeered on the street on account of your color?" "I feel as if an ass had kicked, but had hit nobody," was my answer.” 

“Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.” 

“One and God make a majority.” 

“From apparently the basest metals we have the finest toned bells.” 

“What upon Earth is the matter with the American people? Do they really covet the world's ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin?” 

“Experience is a keen teacher;” 

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” 

“The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro...Sir, the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake.” 

“The thought of only being a creature of the present and past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to speak.” 

“Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.” 

“But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.” 

“I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate.” 

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.” 

There is no royal road to perfection.”

“Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.” 

“I had as well be killed running as die standing”