If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Service
There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Helpfulness, Influence, Life, Leadership, Earth
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Attitude, Hatred, Hate, Being True to Yourself
An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Perseverance
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Racism
The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Ability
Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the everyday things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Attention, Things, Little Things
Character is power.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Character
Any man’s life will be filled with constant, unexpected encouragements of this kind if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life — that is, tries to make each day reach as nearly as possible the high-water mark of pure, unselfish, useful living.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Doing Your Best, Encouragement, Support
One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Kindness
Success is not measured by the heights one attains, but by the obstacles one overcomes in its attainment.
—Booker T. Washington
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Failure, Obstacles, Racism, Success, Opposition
Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Excellence
No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Results
The more you know the less you show.Character is power.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Character
I shall never permit myself to stoop so low as to hate any man.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Hatred
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Adversity, Oppression
We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Prejudice
There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Strength
Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Responsibility, Trust
I think I began learning long ago that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Helpfulness, Joy
Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Character
I have learned, in some degree at least, to disregard the old maxim which says, “Do not get others to do that which you can do yourself”. My motto, on the other hand, is, “Do not do that which others can do as well”.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Confidence
No race can prosper ’til it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the field, as in writing a poem.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Dignity, Labor, Learn, Pride
We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
—Booker T. Washington
Topics: Language
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Frank Moore Colby American Writer, Editor
- Laurence J. Peter Canadian-born American Educator
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- Horace Mann American Educator
- Anne Sullivan Macy American Educator
- Robert H. Shaffer American Educator
- E. Merrill Root American Educator
- Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney American Educator
- Arthur Sherburne Hardy American Engineer
- Marva Collins American Educator
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