Quotes from Sidney Poitier

They have never found that area within themselves where they can be peaceful with who they are, what they are, and where they are. In

Carl Sagan has said, "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.") As

my mother chose to teach me that sometimes gratification has to be delayed.

Progress then and now comes from the collision of powerful forces within the hearts of those who strive for it.

I was still unable to reconcile the uncontrollable passions of "want" and the unmovable insistence of "need" as they battled relentlessly over possession of my meager resources, with "want" winning out over "need" far more frequently than it should have.

And nature doesn't tell you, "I'm going to have one of my guys tap you on the shoulder, and everything is going to be all right for the rest of the day.

The cold hard fact of courage is that it has to spring from within. Because it's opposite, fear, lives inside of us as well...fear really is alive, even when it's just sitting there, free from its influence. Still we are aware how dangerous it is. How debilitating it is, how crippling and how it stops us some times.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

a man the South African government evidently thought too dangerous to be free, but also by then too prominent to be killed.

No one knows all that there is to know. (This despite Mark Twain's observation that between him and Albert Einstein, they encompassed all human knowledge. As he put it, "Einstein knows all that there is to know, and I know the rest.") The task is to learn as much as you can about as much as you can; the great disease of mankind is ignorance. With

Even though it was unnecessary for her to say so, as it was very much water under the bridge, I so appreciated how it underscored that for most human beings, even when we briefly touch up against other lives, we leave our marks on each other. So

Neither of us, however, was prepared for marriage, and neither of us had a way of knowing that. One may have seen successful marriages among family and friends, but there are so many independent energies intertwined in marital success that luck of the draw has to be a part of the whole equation. And we weren't lucky. We

I am what I have become

I am not suggesting that you devote your life to being a missionary. You are entitled to your share of love and joy and leisure and pure happiness. But within the warm periphery of your life, there should be room for passionate involvement. As the Italian poet Antonio Porchia put it: "In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing." Racial

They knew that they were there in the Bahamas because their forefathers had been captured and put on ships and transported to a different part of the world. They knew that those ancestors had a history and a culture, and they talked about that history and culture. Through oral history, they retained some of the fragments of who their great-great-grandfathers were, and probably even some surviving words of their language. They

As a society we have grown to prefer the easy over the difficult, the quick over the slow, the cheap over the costly—and those choices are not often to the benefit of nature. Lord

There is a sense of self, of character, and of personal self-worth and kindness and hopefulness and embrace that is characteristic of such people, educated and noneducated alike. My

I am the me I choose to be.

A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.

I've learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage--self destructive, destroy the world rage--and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.

Okay listen, you think I'm so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value - to you I say, I'm not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.

Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.

As I entered this world, I would leave behind the nurturing of my family and my home, but in another sense I would take their protection with me. The lessons I had learned, the feelings of groundedness and belonging that have been woven into my character there, would be my companions on the journey.

You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.