Quotes about Endurance

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

Being free is as difficult and as perpetual — or rather fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good jew or a good Moslem or a good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up in the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Never let white folks know what you really think. If you're sad, laugh. If you're bleeding inside, dance.

Every storm runs out of rain.

You may trode me in the very dirt. But still, like dust, I'll rise.

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all.

Upon certain subject I am able to hold my tongue and hope that time will right wrongs.

Reality began its tedious crawl back into their reasoning. After all, they were needy and hungry and despised and dispossessed, and sinners the world over were in the driver's seat. How long, merciful Father? How long? A

I have waited toes curled, hat rolled heart and genitals in hand on the back porches of forever in the kitchens and fields of rejections on the cold marble steps of America's White Out-House in the drop seats of buses and the open flies of war

He badder than death yet gives no sweet release.

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again.

Here, root yourselves beside me. I am that Tree planted by the River, Which will not be moved. I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the Tree, I am yours—your passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again.