The quote database

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Nothing is so insupportable to man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without study.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The men you see spending most of their time looking for higher and more lucrative positions are, nine times out of ten, men who have made worthless failures in other places.

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.

We cannot get upon our feet, as a people, until we learn the saving habit; until we learn to save every nickel, every dime and every dollar that we can spare.

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

There is an indescribable something about work with the hands that tends to develop a student's mind.

There is a vast difference between working and being worked.

The suspension of one man's dividends is the suspension of another man's pay envelope.

Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil.

The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat.

These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War

Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.