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You must make up your mind to steady and earnest work. You must be content to get on slowly if you only get on thoroughly.

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess.

With tireless energy and eager zeal, colored women have, since their emancipation, been continuously prosecuting the work of educating and elevating their race, as though upon themselves alone devolved the accomplishment of this great task.

And yet, in spite of the opposition encountered, and the obstacles opposed to their acquisition of knowledge and their accumulation of property, the progress made by colored women along these lines has never been surpassed by that of any people in the history of the world.

Shirking responsibility has never been a fault with which colored women might be truthfully charged.

Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.

Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves

Give others and yourself more credit. It just happened, you witnessed it, you just did it, believe it.

The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it.

We have created a fictitious ceiling, a roof, to our expectations of ourselves, a limit — where we think it’s all too good to be true.

Most things are more rewarding when you break a sweat to get em.

Do not fall into the entitlement trap of feeling you are a victim, you are not. Get over it and get on with it.

We do our best when our destinations are beyond the “measurement,” when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, when we have immortal finish lines.

If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line.

Your fears must be mastered before you can win in any worthwhile undertaking in life.

No one may become a real leader in any walk of life without practicing the habit of doing more work and better work than that for which he is paid.

A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.

Nevertheless, he who has relied least on fortune is established the strongest.

there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new

Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

But instinct is something which transcends knowledge.