Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined or the insect, as well for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.

Let us resolve to be masters, not victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions.

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

This is the thing that I was born to do.

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.

One love, one heart, one destiny.

Whatever happens at all happens as it should; you will find this true, if you watch narrowly.

The generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life. . . To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one’s life as possible is right to me.

The more I study science the more I believe in God.

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, “Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you.”

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.