Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

Each of us has a piece of the puzzle.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

No journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.

Religion... sex... race... money... avoidance rites... malnutrition... dreams - no part of these can be looked at and clearly seen without looking at the whole of them. For, as a painter mixes colors and makes of them new colors, so religion is turned into something different by race, and segregation is colored as much by sex as by skin pigment, and money is no longer a coin but a lost wish wandering through a man’s whole life.

Like sex, knowledge is good if used in the service of life and love.

We let the world down by our moral impotence.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives; it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more securely.

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Freedom and responsibility are like Siamese twins: they die if they are parted.

Freedom is a dreadful thing unless it goes hand in hand with responsibility. Democracy among men is a specter except when the hearts of men are mature.

Minds broken in two. Hearts broken. Conscience torn from acts. A culture split in a thousand pieces. That is segregation.

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.