I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
Bernice Johnson ReagonRead
Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
Interpretation
Challenges in life are meant for personal growth and self-discovery rather than causing fear or inaction.
This quote emphasizes that the difficulties and obstacles we encounter in life serve a greater purpose; they are opportunities for growth and a means to learn about ourselves. Instead of allowing challenges to overwhelm us, we should view them as valuable experiences that contribute to our understanding of who we are and what we are capable of achieving.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming life's obstacles.
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.
The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.
Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.
No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.
Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.
I basically have my life today as a result of what I did as a child. What did I miss out on? Yeah, I missed not hanging out at shopping malls, I guess, but that is not a big deal because you don't get a medal for that.
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.