I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Our choices decide our direction and carve a path for our personal lives and our careers.

This is official today. China has surpassed the U.S. and now has the No. 1 economy in the world. After hearing this, China's children asked, 'So now can we take a lunch break?'

People are so... seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood.

We cannot create jobs without company owners, the state cannot create jobs by decree.

Heaven is to be at peace with things.

When I was young I used to listen to everything.

Experimental science hardly ever affords us more than approximations to the truth; and whenever many agents are concerned we are in great danger of being mistaken.

One thing members of Congress need to realize is how much their reliance on staffers is hurting the institution and helping make it unaccountable.

Once a song comes out, these songs aren't mine. They're everybody's. So there you go.