Sidney Poitier Quotes

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.

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.

A lot of people see Him as the image of a human being: white, on a cloud, with a beard, long hair, and a robe. I think it diminishes God for us to perceive Him in that way, because there is no way there could be a God on a cloud with long hair, a beard, and Caucasian. Could He not be a multicolored God? Could He not be an Asian or African or Hispanic God? Of course He could be. I

Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before. I

"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.

"For somewhere in the back of my mind is that odd explanation that if you whisper a sentence in the ear of one person around a table of many - a short sentence such as "John slept close to a woman with whom he worked" - as those words go around the table, whispered to each person next to another, it might come out, less than a minute later, that John was a sleep-arounder, and he did it with every woman he knew; which meant he probably was gay, because he needed to give the impression of being a raging heterosexual.

Now, if that could happen in one minute, think of the long history of most faiths."

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

In Africa, there are still more men, if you’re looking for courage. There, a few years back, the colonial powers were the ones who owned the government, who owned the guns — the ones who were responsible for whether you ate, had a job, whether your children got an education, or whether you lived or died. But that colonial system was challenged by, in addition to Nelson Mandela, men like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and men in others places. They knew that the authorities would try to eliminate them.

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

(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.

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,

Though I wasn’t always happy when girlfriends’ parents disapproved of my background or my choice of career, I tried not to take it personally. Instead, I focused all the more on improving my standing with the work that I’d chosen. In much later years, from time to time I would run into an old flame or two, or their parents, like an ex-girlfriend’s mom who regretted that her daughter hadn’t married me.

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.

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