“What he craves above all else is that he shall be calm and right and faithful in his place.”

Worth measured by fidelity rather than outward victory · Essay, The Future of Our Culture, Journal of Negro Education

• Duty
• Faith
• Integrity

“The man of culture is not to be surprised, or stampeded, or hurried. He can be neither frustrated nor defeated.”

Inner composure as the mark of a cultivated mind · Essay, The Future of Our Culture, Journal of Negro Education

• Character
• Resilience
• Serenity

“If civilization is tied up with laws that change with a changing society, culture insists upon principles in which there is neither variableness or shadow of turning, upon the eternal verities.”

Culture as fidelity to unchanging moral principles · Essay, The Future of Our Culture, Journal of Negro Education

• Culture
• Principles
• Truth

“If civilization preserves the whole past record of the race in literature, art, trade, war and peace, culture is concerned with the values of that record to human betterment.”

Distinguishing stored achievement from living moral use · Essay, The Future of Our Culture, Journal of Negro Education

• Civilization
• Culture
• Values

“The human family is one.”

His governing idea of brotherhood across racial difference · Essay, What the Negro Wants and How to Get It, as commonly summarized of Hill's view

• Brotherhood
• Humanity
• Unity

“Our democracy is not yet a satisfying reality, but Negroes are still free to live, strive and die to make it come in God's unhurried time. All else by comparison is trivial.”

Democracy treated as unfinished work worth a lifetime · Essay, What the Negro Wants and How to Get It, 1944

• Democracy
• Hope
• Patience

“In every emergency the Negro race in America must give to the nation its unreserved allegiance. Wrongs will remain, but increasing opportunities and obligations will surpass them.”

Loyalty paired with a refusal to treat remaining injustice as the whole story · Essay, What the Negro Wants and How to Get It, 1944

• America
• Citizenship
• Duty

“The white man has no fine quality, either of heart or mind, which is not shared by his black brother.”

A plain claim of shared human excellence across the colour line · Foreword, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, 1920

• Brotherhood
• Equality
• Humanity

“Let those voices speak of self-reliance, noble striving, and ambition for high achievement, and the quality of the adult life will generally be of the same character.”

What childhood hears becomes the grain of later character · Foreword, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, 1920

• Ambition
• Character
• Teaching

“Therefore nothing is more important to the development of any people than the content of those printed pages on which they form their youthful minds.”

Books as the seedbed of a people's ideals · Foreword, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, 1920

• Books
• Education
• Youth

“What the children read the fathers will believe. What the fathers believe will constitute the ideals of the race.”

Linking early reading to the moral future of a people · Foreword, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, 1920

• Children
• Education
• Reading

“He has advanced against all opposition by a certain elevation of his spirit.”

Progress framed as moral and spiritual height rather than force · Foreword, The Wings of Oppression, 1921

• Dignity
• Progress
• Spirit

“The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life.”

Crediting an inward philosophy for survival under pressure · Foreword, The Wings of Oppression, 1921

• Endurance
• Faith
• Philosophy

“He has been made strong in tribulation. He has constrained oppression to give him wings.”

Turning hardship into spiritual lift rather than defeat · Foreword, The Wings of Oppression, 1921

• Hope
• Strength
• Suffering

“Nothing in the life of the nation has seemed to me more significant than that civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it.”

Honouring a community built under systematic hostility · Foreword, The Wings of Oppression, 1921

• America
• Civilization
• Resilience

“In my younger days I struggled with an overwhelming but honest love — my only one — and I should have struggled longer had not a bitter but salutary death put out the cooling flame.”

Original: Amore acerrimo sed unico et honesto in adolescentia laboravi, et diutius laborassem nisi iam tepescentem ignem mors acerba sed utilis extinxisset. — His own later account of the Laura passion, stripped of lyric ornament. · Letter to Posterity (Posteritati) (Latin)

• Death
• Love
• Youth

“I seem to you to have written everything, or at least a great deal; to myself I appear to have produced almost nothing.”

Original: Tibi omnia, vel certe multa, scripsisse videor; mihi autem paene nihil edidisse. — An ageing writer's sense that fame and inner judgement do not match. · Letter to Giovanni Boccaccio, 28 April 1373 (Latin)

• Fame
• Humility
• Writing

“The more I travel the world, the less I like it.”

Original: Il mondo, più che io lo giro, e meno mi piace. — Weariness of courts and cities behind the love of Vaucluse and books. · Familiar letters, commonly cited in Italian versions of the Latin correspondence

• Discontentment
• Travel
• World

“Five enemies of peace live with us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were banished, we should enjoy perpetual peace.”

Original: Quinque pacis hostes nobiscum habitant: avaritia, ambitio, invidia, ira et superbia; his exactis perpetua pace frueremur. — Peace is framed as an inner expulsion of the passions rather than a political settlement. · Widely attributed from De remediis utriusque fortunae (Latin)

• Anger
• Peace
• Pride

“Man has no greater enemy than himself.”

Original: Nullum homini maius hostem quam se ipsum. — A moral commonplace of his dialogues on fortune: we thwart our own intentions. · De remediis utriusque fortunae, Book II (Latin)

• Character
• Self
• Struggle

“Constant toil and unbroken application are the food of my spirit; when I begin to rest and slacken my work, I shall also cease to live.”

Original: Labor assiduus et continua applicatio cibus est animi mei; cum quiescere et laborem remittere coepero, tunc etiam vivere desinam. — Work as vocation rather than burden. · Letters (Epistole), commonly cited (Latin)

• Discipline
• Life
• Work

“Books have led some to learning and others to madness.”

Original: Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. — A caution that reading without measure can unhinge as easily as it can instruct. · De remediis utriusque fortunae, on the abundance of books (Latin)

• Books
• Knowledge
• Madness

“What good is it to teach others if you do not first listen to yourself?”

Original: A che ti giova insegnare agli altri, se intanto tu per primo non ascolti te stesso? — A rebuke of the admired Cicero that turns moral authority inward. · Letter to Cicero, Familiares XXIV, 3 (commonly given in Italian from the Latin original)

• Advice
• Authors
• Self Knowledge

“In order to forget my own times I have constantly tried to place myself in spirit in other ages, and so I delighted in history.”

Original: Ut me ipsum temporibus meis subducerem, semper animo in alia secula transferre conatus sum, ideoque historiis delectatus sum. — Reading as a deliberate escape from one's century. · Letter to Posterity (Posteritati) (Latin)

• History
• Imagination
• Time