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No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.

Cast down your bucket where you are.

My experience has been that the time to test a true gentleman is to observe him when he is in contact with individuals of a race that is less fortunate than his own.

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.

I will not say that I became discouraged, for as I now look back over my life I do not recall that I ever became discouraged over anything that I set out to accomplish.

Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.

My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.

The Negro boy has obstacles, discouragements, and temptations to battle with that are little known to those not situated as he is.

Ever since then I have had no patience with any school for my race in the South which did not teach its students the dignity of labour.

At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy.

From the time that I can remember anything, almost every day of my life had been occupied in some kind of labour; though I think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports.

My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what colour of skin merit is found.

out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth

I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed

There is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

Make up your minds that you are going to overcome every discouragement, and that you are not going to let any discouragement overcome you.

Very many people, very many students, who otherwise would succeed, who would go through school creditably, graduating with honours, have failed to succeed because they became discouraged.

Any one can seek a job, but it requires a person of rare ability to create a job.

There are but two directions in this life in which you can grow; backward or forward.

The point is, that we want to be constantly on the lookout for ways of improving whatever work we are engaged in, whether that work be milking cows or doing something else.

Your life will be wasted if you go away from here and have not learned that the greatest lesson of all is the lesson of brotherly love, of usefulness and of charity.