Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.
Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
And then, the negro being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage, is the white man quite certain that the tyrant demon will not turn upon him too?
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.
When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that three of his fingers are pointing at himself. Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.
There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth ... lust. When he is strong ... quarrelsomeness. When he is old ... covetousness.