Top 217 Quotes & Sayings by Zora Neale Hurston

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.

So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.

Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.

It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.

Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

I regret all of my books.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.

It costs you something to do good!

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.

No man may make another free.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say.

Gods always love the people who make em.

The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.

When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.

That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

There's two things everybody got to find out for themselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It's a moving thing. And it's different on every shore. And living... well... There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Mystery is the essence of divinity

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.

Such as I am, I am a precious gift.

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.

Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

You got to go there to know there.