James Weldon Johnson Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

My luck at the gambling table was varied; sometimes I was fifty to a hundred dollars ahead, and at other times I had to borrow money from my fellow workmen to settle my room rent and pay for my meals.

James Weldon Johnson
A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.

James Weldon Johnson
Evil is a force and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form. We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms

James Weldon Johnson
When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there is very little difference the world over.

James Weldon Johnson
Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay.

James Weldon Johnson
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?

James Weldon Johnson
But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

James Weldon Johnson
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

James Weldon Johnson
Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

James Weldon Johnson
A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

James Weldon Johnson
Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation.

James Weldon Johnson
At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes? I also learned the names of the notes in both clefs, but I preferred not be hampered by notes.

James Weldon Johnson
And Satan smiled, stretched out his hand, and said,—
"O War, of all the scourges of humanity, I crown you chief."

James Weldon Johnson
Whose starward eye
Saw chariot swing low? And who was he
That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh,
Nobody knows de trouble I see?

James Weldon Johnson
The time of the psychological passing over from boyhood to manhood is a movable feast. The legal date fixed on the twenty-first birthday has little or no connection with it. There are men in their teens, and there are boys in their forties.

James Weldon Johnson
The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of Morning blushing in the early skies.

James Weldon Johnson
Some men enjoy the constant strife
Of days with work and worry rife,
But that is not my dream of life:
I think such men are crazy.
For me, a life with worries few,
A job of nothing much to do,
Just pelf enough to see me through:
I fear that I am lazy.

James Weldon Johnson
And so for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books.

James Weldon Johnson
New York is the most fatally fascinating thing in America.

James Weldon Johnson
And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely—
I'll make me a world."

James Weldon Johnson
My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage

James Weldon Johnson
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around his shoulder.

James Weldon Johnson
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image.

James Weldon Johnson
Through my music teaching and my not absolutely irregular attendance at church, I became acquainted with the best class of colored people in Jacksonville.

James Weldon Johnson
I am a thing not new, I am as old
As human nature. I am that which lurks,
Ready to spring whenever a bar is loosed;
The ancient trait which fights incessantly
Against restraint, balks at the upward climb;
The weight forever seeking to obey
The law of downward pull;—and I am more:
The bitter fruit am I of planted seed;
The resultant, the inevitable end
Of evil forces and the powers of wrong.

James Weldon Johnson
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

James Weldon Johnson
It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.

James Weldon Johnson
Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience.

James Weldon Johnson
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.

James Weldon Johnson
My appearance was always good and my ability to play on the piano, especially ragtime, which was then at the height of its vogue, made me a welcome guest.

James Weldon Johnson