Nayyirah Waheed

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.

Today is a king in disguise.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

Events tend to recur in cycles.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his work and in that work he does what he wants to do.