Langston Hughes Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

While over Alabama earth
These words are gently spoken:
Serve — and hate will die unborn.
Love — and chains are broken.

Langston Hughes
When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Langston Hughes
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it... what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you.

Langston Hughes
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

Langston Hughes
It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.

Langston Hughes
The instructor said, Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
Then, it will be true.

Langston Hughes
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

Langston Hughes
My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

Langston Hughes
Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon—
But that day's gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible —
But it's dead now.

Langston Hughes
Negro blood is sure powerful — because just onedrop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop—you are a Negro!... Black is powerful.

Langston Hughes
I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway.
He did a lazy sway.
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.

Langston Hughes
You talk like they
don't kick dreams
around downtown.

Langston Hughes
Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud —
Not like a shroud.

Langston Hughes
Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.

Langston Hughes
Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!

Langston Hughes
Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.

Langston Hughes
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

Langston Hughes
For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.

Langston Hughes
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Langston Hughes
It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.

Langston Hughes
These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.

Langston Hughes
Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat.

Langston Hughes
Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

Langston Hughes
Saturday and Sunday's
Fun to sport around.
But no use denying—
Monday'll get you down.

Langston Hughes
I do not want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her-then you got to kill somebody about her. She'll make you so jealous, you'll bust!

Langston Hughes
If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

Langston Hughes
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Langston Hughes
Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead.

Langston Hughes
It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.

Langston Hughes