Aberjhani Quotes

Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.

Beauty will snatch us by the heart and love us until we are raw with understanding.

The ultimate test on the way to establishing an ideal civilization encouraging ideal human behavior was to look bravely beyond gender, color, ethnic origin, religious difference, and class distinctions to discover and honor the value of each unique individual.

The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.

A strategic use of black culture could help generate a more efficient use of American democracy,and democracy more effectively practiced could then produce a genuinely spiritual nation of people.

Only God singing this song of you... makes true light... somehow possible.

In the face of a world where economic hardships often ground the best of the human spirit into the worst, love provided a pathway into hidden chambers of the spirit where nobility and compassion might be salvaged, resurrected, and made stronger.

In the end, it was strength he was reaching for once again to begin his journey anew and do the one thing he did better than anybody else.”

He W.E.B. Du Bois was at once a scientist in his skillful use of history as a tool for comprehending the present, and a prophet in the application of his gift for analyzing the present as an indicator of the future. Because he lived both firmly entrenched within his time and decades ahead of it, the light of his wisdom, like that of his great love for humanity, is one that never diminishes.

Whether naïve on my part or not, it seemed worth taking the time to try to convince others that their lives possessed beauty and meaning worth preserving and honoring.

Life possesses an amazing array of profoundly sad faces.

I think of the French polymath Boris Vian (1920-1959) who burned the candles of his creative genius at every end he could light. And I think of the way Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987) hammered with

You are the man newly arriving
at history’s worm-ravaged door,
the woman whose shadows are salves
upon the bleeding breasts of the earth,
the infant whose heartbeat
floods every harp in Paradise.

It is true that poems and stories generally have only a single name attached to them where authorship is concerned but in many ways they are born of much more than any single individual. They evolve out of meetings of minds, the collective heartbeats of communities, and the shared journeys of similar souls.

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. It does not end when jetliners are used as bombs to decimate skyscrapers, nor does it end when a father shoots to death his adolescent son and daughter. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. It is, after all, not only nations and communities that need peace so desperately but individuals divided against other individuals and within themselves.