If I'm killed - if I'm removed - there is nowhere else for me to go but to my ancestors.
Don’t look for society to give you permission to be yourself.
Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.
It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
Experience has taught me that there is one chief reason why some people succeed and others fail. The difference is not one of knowing, but of doing. The successful man is not so superior in ability as in action. So far as success can be reduced to a formula, it consists of this: doing what you know you should do.
It takes a person who is wide awake to make his dream come true.
Do not let yourselves be discouraged or embittered by the smallness of the success you are likely to achieve in trying to make life better. You certainly would not be able, in a single generation, to create an earthly paradise. Who could expect that? But, if you make life ever so little better, you will have done splendidly, and your lives will have been worthwhile. Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but, character, health, knowledge and good judgement will always be in demand under all conditions.
The rhythms of nature - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.
Moral contempt is a far greater indignity and insult than any kind of crime.
Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.
None of us can come to the highest maturity without enduring the summer heat of trials.