Quotes by James Weldon Johnson
I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.
Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend.
I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race.
Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.
Once you become famous, there is nothing left to become but infamous.
There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart.
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.
The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge, or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed everything generally supposed to confer happiness have been forced to seek it is the shades of privacy.
Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.
Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them.
The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.
Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.
He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many foulder in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.
Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, "I did not give it to the man, but to humanity."
Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.
If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them.
Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterward propagate it.
Judgment is forced upon us by experience.
He that never thinks can never be wise.
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read.
The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things--the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
To have gold is to be in fear, and to want it to be sorrow.
Confidence is a plant of slow growth; especially in an aged bosom.
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.
