Quotes by Activists - Page 87

A Woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing.She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself
Maya Angelou
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
I sustain myself with the love of family.
Maya Angelou
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?", Oct. 4, 1930)]
Mahatma Gandhi
Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.
Nelson Mandela
Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.
Helen Keller
The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
Maya Angelou
Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.
Maya Angelou
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.
Mahatma Gandhi
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou
Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!
Maya Angelou
. . . when it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.
Rebecca Walker
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Alice Walker
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
Mahatma Gandhi
I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")
Maya Angelou
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mahatma Gandhi
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller
What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.
Maya Angelou
Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
Simone Weil
...It’s hard to watchthe game we make of love,like everyone’s playing checkerswith their scars,saying checkmatewhenever they get outwithout a broken heart.Just to be clearI don’t want to get outwithout a broken heart.I intend to leave this lifeso shatteredthere’s gonna have to bea thousand separate heavensfor all of my flying parts.
Andrea Gibson
Surely the earth can be savedby all the peoplewho insiston love.
Alice Walker
This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.
Maya Angelou
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Alice Walker
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou
Life is a succesion of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
Helen Keller
Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing largerThan your own small heartOr greater than a star;Tame wild disappointmentWith caress unmoved and coldMake of it a parkaFor your soul.Discover the reason whySo tiny human midgetExists at allSo scared unwiseBut expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.
Alice Walker
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.
James Baldwin
My life has been one great big joke,A dance that's walked,A song that's spoke,I laugh so hard I almost choke,When I think about myself.
Maya Angelou
People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
Helen Keller
For JennAt 12 years old I started bleeding with the moonand beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.I fought with my knuckles white as stars,and left bruises the shape of Salem.There are things we know by heart,and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,but I could never make dying beautiful.The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myselfveins are kite strings you can only cut free.I suppose I love this life,in spite of my clenched fist.I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger.We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.But my lungs rememberthe day my mother took my hand and placed it on her bellyand told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.And I knew life would tremblelike the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,like a prayer on a dying man's lips,like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…just take me just take meSometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,but you still have to call it a birthday.You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recessand hope she knows you can hit a baseballfurther than any boy in the whole third gradeand I've been running for homethrough the windpipe of a man who singswhile his hands playing washboard with a spoonon a street corner in New Orleanswhere every boarded up window is still painted with the wordsWe're Coming Backlike a promise to the oceanthat we will always keep moving towards the music,the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open.The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,then wake us washing the feet of pregnant womenwho climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.I know the heartbeat of his mother.Don't cover your ears, Love.Don't cover your ears, Life.There is a boy writing poems in Central Parkand as he writes he movesand his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,and there are men playing chess in the December coldwho can't tell if the breath rising from the boardis their opponents or their own,and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subwayswearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrunwith strip malls and traffic and vendorsand one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.
Andrea Gibson
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
Arundhati Roy
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content
Helen Keller
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.
Helen Keller
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
James Baldwin
You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.
Mary Tyler Moore
You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.
Bill Ayers
I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.
Maya Angelou
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
Mahatma Gandhi
When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around us becomeslight, rare, sterile.We breathe, briefly.Our eyes, briefly,see witha hurtful clarity.Our memory, suddenly sharpened,examines,gnaws on kind wordsunsaid,promised walksnever taken.Great souls die andour reality, bound tothem, takes leave of us.Our souls,dependent upon theirnurture,now shrink, wizened.Our minds, formedand informed by theirradiance,fall away.We are not so much maddenedas reduced to the unutterable ignoranceof dark, coldcaves.And when great souls die,after a period peace blooms,slowly and alwaysirregularly. Spaces fillwith a kind ofsoothing electric vibration.Our senses, restored, neverto be the same, whisper to us.They existed. They existed.We can be. Be and bebetter. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
Helen Keller
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
Maya Angelou
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Arundhati Roy
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm cuz I'd rather be left for dead than wondering what thunder sounds like.
Andrea Gibson
Happiness does not come from without, it comes from within
Helen Keller
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
James Baldwin
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!
Audre Lorde
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Rebecca Solnit
the world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by.
Nikki Giovanni
Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.
Alice Walker
Relationships are like Rome -- difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the 'golden age', and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom like Egypt... that thrives, and continues to flourish. This kingdom will become your best friend, your soul mate, and your love.
Helen Keller
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
Maya Angelou
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
Anna Louise Strong
I have always found that actively lovingsaves one from a morbid preoccupationwith the shortcomings of society.
Alan Paton
Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling likethey're falling in love with the ground.
Andrea Gibson