There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.

She was my first love, and I loved her as only a boy loves.

You are young, gifted, and Black. We must begin to tell our young, There's a world waiting for you, Yours is the quest that's just begun.

Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage

The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.