Great Black Quotes

#1. There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

Erica Jong

#2. No mortal ear could have heard the kelpie passing through the night, for the great black hooves of it were as soundless in their stride as feathers falling.

Mollie Hunter

#3. It was as though the great black bird which had all the night nested the egg of the earth lifted its wings and let light under and then with gigantic thrust of pinion flew upwards and it was day.

Glendon Swarthout

#4. For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.

David Zindell

#5. Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California

Joaquin Miller

#6. The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

William Butler Yeats

#7. I peek over the back of the couch and there she is, my goddess of death, her hair snaking out in a great black cloud, her teeth grinding hard enough to make living gums bleed.

Kendare Blake

#8. The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and color are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows ... Color is surface skin that fits over the form.

John French Sloan

#9. So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.

Ford Madox Ford

#10. What did you have in you? - some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.

Jack London

#11. The great black bird broods outside my window in the high dark night waiting to enfold me when I leave the house tomorrow only I'm going to dodge it successfully by sheer animalism and ability and even exhilaration, so goodnight

Jack Kerouac

#12. I don't see myself as the Great Black Hope. I'm just a golfer who happens to be black and Asian. It doesn't matter whether they're white, black, brown or green.

Tiger Woods

#13. So there I was, sitting on the plane in a black leather motorcycle jacket, seeing these palm trees through the window as we landed. And I thought, Great. Black leather and palm trees. Already I'm fitting in, just like I knew I would ...
... Not.

Meg Cabot

#14. Some have said that if you take a great picture in color and take away the color, you'll have a great black-and-white picture. But if you're shooting something about color and you take away the color, you'll have nothing.

Jay Maisel

#15. Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.

Frantz Fanon

#16. Legend gathered around him, swirling around him like a great black cloak.

Celia Rees

#17. It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.

Cornel West

#18. If I was the Jackie Robinson of golf, I sure didn't do a very good job of it. Jackie was followed by hundreds of great black ballplayers who have transformed their sport ... But there are hardly any black kids coming up through the ranks of golf today.

Charlie Sifford

#19. Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

Etty Hillesum

#20. Then, all of a sudden, there was a great black hull, stretching farther than my eye could see.

Ellen Emerson White

#21. Lo, and I have discovered
how soft bloom
turns to green fruit,
which turns to sweet fruit.
Lo, and I have discovered
all winds blow cold
at last,
and the leaves,
so pretty, so many,
vanish
in the great, black
packet of time

Mary Oliver

#22. The narrow path had opened up suddenly onto the edge of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.

J.K. Rowling

#23. One thing to avoid is trendy stuff, though - you gotta go timeless. Even if you want a little luxury in your life and you want to splurge on a Gucci bag, pick a great black one you can wear all the time.

NeNe Leakes

#24. For one brief, the great black dog reared onto its hind legs and placed its front paws on Harry's shoulders, but Mrs. Weasley shoved Harry away toward the train door hissing, For heaven's sake act more like a dog, Sirius!

J.K. Rowling

#25. Unfortunately there is a standard set for it that precedes hip-hop. It would be great if corporate America didn't do this, but there is a huge market for sex and violence and anti-Black representations in America and the world that doesn't begin or end with hip-hop.

Bakari Kitwana

#26. I find any great man, black or white, I'm going to study him, learn him so he can't be great to me no more.

Tupac Shakur

#27. A karate black belt would make a great blindfold on a kidnap victim, after you karate chop them into submission.

Jarod Kintz

#28. The great white sharks with their rough, pale sides, the killer whales striped in black and white like an Edwardian garden chaise.

Cassandra Clare

#29. The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and our hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice.

Black Elk

#30. The Internet is not a place. It's a great void, a black hole, from which you can call up an incredible amount of disorganized information.

Eleanor Antin

#31. Black men, you were once great; you shall be great again. Lose not courage or faith, go forward.

Marcus Garvey

#32. A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

Tom Stoppard

#33. The black woman had had to struggle against being a person of great strength.

Dorothy Height

#34. The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.

Ayn Rand

#35. I liked Jackie Robinson because he was cool to watch, not because he was black. Every time you turned around, he was hitting a triple or making a great play in the field or, best of all, stealing home.

Cheech Marin

#36. So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets ...

Oscar Wilde

#37. Bernie Sanders has done a great job of, social media black kids know about him. Young black people progressives know about him. Through barbershops and barbershop tour that we have been on, we hit three barbershops a day. People know about him.

Killer Mike

#38. Progress for black Americans depends on good schools because education is the last great equalizer.

Alphonso Jackson

#39. It's a great day in America when white people, black people and Latinos can all come together and pick on another minority.

George Lopez

#40. You know, even with the 'Awkward Black Girl' episodes, they come out once a month. That's great for me, it's comfortable, it gives each time to digest, time for new people to get on to it and caught up, but oftentimes I have people who are almost demanding a higher output from me.

Issa Rae

#41. My webmaster lives in Munich and is a very dear friend of mine. He is doing a great job on the site and it is constantly being updated and always will.

Jimmy Carl Black

#42. I think it's going to be great if people can buy a ticket to fly up and see black sky and the stars. I'd like to do it myself-but probably after it has flown a serious number of times first!

Paul Allen

#43. My great blessing is my son, but I have daughters. I have white ones and Black ones and fat ones and thin ones and pretty ones and plain. I have gay ones and straight. I have daughters. I have Asian ones, I have Jewish ones, I have Muslim ones.

Maya Angelou

#44. Escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.

Charles Bukowski

#45. It's not even about black and white anymore, because so many people are from mixed backgrounds and mixed ethnicities, and it's just a great time to be able to pull all that together.

George Lopez

#46. One day. my kids are gonna be like, 'What do you mean, gay people couldn't get married?' Just like most of my friends are black, and I find it hard to believe that my great-grandmother and even my grandmother couldn't hang out with black kids when they were young.

Miley Cyrus

#47. I don't buy the 'at 60 it's great to have kids' thing. I don't buy the line that has been thrown down - 'You can have a kid at any time.' That doesn't mean you should.

Lewis Black

#48. The country is like a great sponge - it finally absorbs you. Eventually you will get malaria or you will get dysentery and whatever you do, if you don't keep doing it, the jungle will grow over you. Black or white, you've got to fight it every minute of the day.

Katharine Hepburn

#49. How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died.

Virginia Woolf

#50. I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

Peter Matthiessen

#51. My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away

Black Hawk

#52. I've got a small, loyal audience, which is great. And I appreciate that. They're there for me every time.

Frank Black

#53. Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.

Black Elk

#54. People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches - like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin - were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.

Ahmet Ertegun

#55. I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision

Carl Sandburg

#56. Obedient to her captain's will, The Black Pearl followed her dark angel over the azure water; as fast as the wind, as free as the men who sailed her. it was almost as though she knew she was a legend in the making, destined for adventures both great and terrible...

A.C. Crispin

#57. Hey, as you leave, Qhuinn wanted to say, will you do me a favor? I think my left ventricle is on the floor, so don't step on it as you pull out? Thanks. Great.

J.R. Ward

#58. Great opportunity is only as good as your preparation to take advantage of it.

Tom Black

#59. Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".

Bishop Robert Barron

#60. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

Herman Melville

#61. It is with great disappointment and regret that after having the privilege of writing and performing the music of The Black Crowes over the last 24 years, I find myself in the position of saying that the band has broken up.

Rich Robinson

#62. 80% of the mistakes you will make in information architecture can be caught if you bring in a great usability expert from the beginning.

Roger Black

#63. I fully recognize and appreciate the many substantial contributions of black Americans and other minorities to the creation and preservation and development of our great nation.

Strom Thurmond

#64. Our world was Northern, black and white, so it was a great thing for my sisters and me to sit down at Christmastime and watch these fabulous MGM musicals. All that color, all those beautiful costumes.

Tracie Bennett

#65. It's great to know that young black girls are seeing themselves on TV as leading ladies, and I'm part of that. It's just such an honor.

Candice Patton

#66. When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.

Judy Garland

#67. I do not admit ... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia ... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race ... has come in and taken its place.

Winston Churchill

#68. People told me, when I was coming through the ranks, that a mark of a great actor is one who deals with the period of unemployment as well as they deal with the period of employment.

Claudia Black

#69. And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.

Black Elk

#70. I am of the generation of segregation. Black Lives Matter is post. I said today, and I will say all the time, "If Nina [Simone] were here, she'd have her Black Lives Matter [T-shirt] on." I think they're great kids. They don't need me or anybody else to tell them what to do.

Nikki Giovanni

#71. Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

Lewis Black

#72. I haven't done a great deal of it but this was a chance to do more and bring it to that part of the business and even more so, but the fact that it was a black superhero was really the catalyst to me.

Blair Underwood

#73. The greatest gift in life is the ability to think great thoughts and have the strength to take action so that those thoughts become reality in this wonderful and abundant world.

Jack Black

#74. Poor or rich, black or white, quiet or naughty, mentally defective or sharp-witted, thin or fat, all children are great!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#75. Every time I have to try on a wig for work, I get excited about the colour; I've often thought about going for a platinum bob or also raven black, as it looks so great against pale skin. But I always end up being loyal to my red colour.

Lily Cole

#76. 'Orange Is the New Black' and 'Sense8' have enjoyed great success all over the world.

Ted Sarandos

#77. We were the only black family in my neighborhood for many years. Wherever we lived, we were often the only black family, and certainly the only Haitian family. But my parents were really great at providing a loving home where we could feel safe and secure.

Roxane Gay

#78. Terrorists cannot threaten the survival of a great nation.

Conrad Black

#79. Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things.

Dhani Jones

#80. In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#81. Good! Brad thought. Great! I can see the headline now: MORGANTOWN MYSTERY DISEASE FELLS ALL CHILDREN, BUT TOLL PALES IN COMPARISON WITH BLACK DEATH. CDC OFFICIALS GREATLY RELIEVED!

Chet Williamson

#82. 'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.

Victor LaValle

#83. Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

James Black

#84. You can never go wrong with a nice red lip. I'm not afraid to wear it during the day or basically any time because I wear a lot of black and it's a great backdrop for it.

Crystal Renn

#85. This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black
witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.

Ambrose Bierce

#86. This great son of the world, Madiba, showed us the way. Whether you are white, black yellow or brown you are all God's children, come together, work together and God will show you the way.

Kenneth Kaunda

#87. I have always taken great comfort in newspapers. No matter how horrid an event, there is something in seeing it described in black and white that makes it somehow bearable.

Susan Higginbotham

#88. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

Barack Obama

#89. The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have
always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid.

Elbert Hubbard

#90. As far as trucks, the great thing about a Range Rover is if you're going out for a dinner, even a black tie event, you can take the Range Rover.

Luke Goss

#91. Black holes generate an amazing amount of light. The problem is, their gravity is so great, the light can't escape - it just gets pulled in along with everything else.

Neal Shusterman

#92. Great Granny Webster seemed to hate colours. Almost everything she owned was either black or dark brown.

Caroline Blackwood

#93. My story has more than a "great white hope" plot. I loved and respected Tom because he was a servant of God who happened to be white, just as I feel I am a servant of God who happens to be black and from Africa.

Francis Mandewah

#94. The wealth of south Florida, but even more important, the meaning and significance of south Florida lies in the black muck of the Everglades and the inevitable development of this country to be the great tropic agricultural center of the world.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

#95. Old film-noir movies. There's something comforting about watching black-and-white movies, and hearing this kind of music just puts me in a fantasy world. It's a really great escape for me.

Petra Haden

#96. Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.

Soledad O'Brien

#97. Four are the tributaries of the great river. Four are the harvests from floodseason to dust. Four are the great treasures: timbalin, myrrh, lapis, and jungissa. Four bands of color mark the face of the Dreaming Moon. Red for blood. White for seed. Yellow for ichor. Black for bile.

N.K. Jemisin

#98. Black and white is much closer to the condition of
dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was
part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.

John Boorman

#99. Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.

Black Elk

#100. I learned from Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, the Nicholas Brothers, the whole thing, the whole schmear. [The Cotton Club] was a great place because it hired us, for one thing, at a time when it was really rough [for Black performers].

Lena Horne