Ralph Ellison Quotes

Even dumb things can be related to events in our lives and, perhaps, gain significance simply because we have taken them into our own hands.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason. That’s what I used to think. But it’s not true. Logic can’t prove anything. It’s a weak instrument.

To see the power of a system, watch who it empowers and who it disempowers.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Man is a social animal. But that does not mean he cannot feel lonely.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.

If you can see me without preconceptions, you can see the possibilities I represent.

The world is filled with things I didn’t do.

I dream things that never were and say why not?

Ralph Ellison Quotes part 2

I will leap into the sun and be clothed with light and power.

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

It’s not the world that’s messed up; it’s the people.

People are not machines. They have hearts.

Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting, and self-stopping, self-warming, and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

I am invisible, not blind.

Perhaps the most futile, yet most human, of all human activities is that of trying to understand, to define, to change the natural world.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Safe under the shadow of ignorance.

Smile, for everyone lacks self-confidence and more than any other one thing a smile reassures them.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

I am an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

I think it is his image of America, in the future, that provokes me, and that at the time I saw it mainly in terms of art rather than of politics.

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

I don’t know what happened deep within us, I only know they left us with a responsibility we are still trying to bear.

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

A man is what he does, not what he says.

I am nobody but myself.

I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

I am an invisible man.