It is not down in any map; true places never are.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaring evident which everybody had decided not to see.

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.

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.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

On some preference esteem is based; to esteem everything is to esteem nothing.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.