Teach yourself. Help yourself. Improve yourself. Enrich yourself.

A genuine smile is one of the world’s rarest treasures.

A fish that is afraid of drowning in a river is ignorant of its gifts.

A diamond earns its sparkle from the pressure it endures.

It is in the storm, not the calm, that a rainbow is born.

A determined seed cannot be hidden from the world, not even by dirt.

Calm skies don't make skillful eagles.

If you cry in the rain, only the sky will see your tears.

Birds keep singing beautiful songs, even if they have no audience.

Today's storms help you appreciate tomorrow’s sunshine.

Train the ears to hear more, the eyes to see more, the hands to do more, the feet to accomplish more, the mind to think more, the heart to feel more, and the soul to love more.

Stop hating yourself for the things you have not and start loving yourself for the things that you have.

Life comes in clusters clusters of solitude then clusters when there is hardly time to breathe.

I am a nationalist, and a Pan-Africanist, first and foremost. I was well grounded in history before ever taking a history course. I did not spend much formal time in school - I had to work.

Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.

There is no one as strong as a person whose heart is always filled with gratitude.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

It is so much easier sometimes to sit down and be resigned than to rise up and be indignant.

I like men who are intelligent and sensitive.

You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.

When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.