Black Women Inspirational Quotes

Don't let anyone rob you of hope. ~ Pope Francis

Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

When a woman says she doesn't want to be your fling, it doesn't mean she wants to be your girlfriend either. All the signs and words may just be her way of accommodating you or showing that you're good company, and not because she loves you at all to want
more from you. ~ Temitayo Olami

I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean. ~ Kola Boof

We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community. ~ Marita Golden

A black widow loves her mate then kills him. A praying mantis loves her mate then eats him. Women love my dad, but he's too big to eat. ~ Christopher Titus

She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Most men and women will yield to the strong currents sucking them into the seas of ruin. Only the strongest in mind and spirit will swim against that current. ~ Ted Dekker

Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.

Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflecting on others the very same carnage once inflicted on them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again - she knew them only as Widow This or Widow That - but she'd never met a Widower Anything. ~ Omar El Akkad

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much" ... No woman has ever written enough. ~ Bell Hooks

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time
without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock. ~ Dylan Thomas

I think there is a certain age, for women, when you become fearless. It may be a different age for every woman, I don't know. It's not that you stop fearing things: I'm still afraid of heights, for example. Or rather, of falling - heights aren't the problem. But you stop fearing life itself. It's when you become fearless in that way that you decide to live.
Perhaps it's when you come to the realization that the point of life isn't to be rich, or secure, or even to be loved - to be any of the things that people usually think is the point. The point of life is to live as deeply as possible, to experience fully. And that can be done in so many ways."
(From her blog post "Fearless Women") ~ Theodora Goss

How bad will it hurt?" I ask suddenly as Cain pulls the car onto the road to head back to my house.
"How bad will what hurt?"
"The spankings, the torture, all the ways you want to punish me."
"I'm not a sadist, Evan. I don't get off on hurting women."
"So it won't hurt?"
"Oh, it will, but you'll love the way it hurts," he says, and as his words fall upon my ears in a harmony of exhilaration and foreboding, I think I'm beginning to understand. ~ Lilly Black

The Gems did not nag or complain, did not get periods or PMT, did not get pregnant, did not get body odour or hair, did not have discharge or bad breath, no shit or urine, did not get spots, did not suffer from diseases or headaches, did not have annoying bad habits, never farted, belched, vomited or picked their noses, did not need drugs or alcohol, did not need gifts such as jewellery, flowers, chocolate and money, did not need to shop, did not have piercings or tattoos, had no capacity to willingly lie or be fake, were never disloyal, were always eager to do any task required by their owner, sexual or non-sexual, did all the housework and cooking without complaint, were produced in the form of the perfect woman in the eyes of each client, did not constantly require their man to tell them they loved them, but most of all they did not age. ~ Robert Black

How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very blessings of civilisation. What is you excuse? it is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time.
There is truth in what you say - I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1886; that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by the law to possess her own property; and that in 1919 - which is a whole nine years ago - she was given a vote? May I also remin ~ Virginia Woolf

At what point did men decide that women are "on the market" to "be picked?" "Pick me! Pick me!" Oh really? Is it really like that? I shall be the one to do the picking, thank you. No one will in any way line me up against the wall and take a pick. Men do not do the picking. Women do the picking. Only stupid women wish to be "picked out." This is the ancient way, this is the way of gods and angels. Women are not "on the market;" women are seated on thrones. ~ C. JoyBell C.

As far back as slavery, white people established a social hierarchy based on race and sex that ranked white men first, white women second, though sometimes equal to black men, who are ranked third, and black women last. What this means in terms of the sexual politics of rape is that if one white woman is raped by a black man, it is seen as more important, more significant than if thousands of black women are raped by one white man. Most Americans, and that includes black people, acknowledge and accept this hierarchy; they have internalized it either consciously or unconsciously. And for this reason, all through American history, black male rape of white women has attracted much more attention and is seen as much more significant than rape of black women by either white or black men. ~ Bell Hooks

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

There's competition among women everywhere you go. But back home, we understand that you can look like a variety of things and still be from the same culture. What I'm saying is that I've never felt like I was a light-skinned black woman. Never felt that way because we shared the same culture back home. ~ Grace Gealey

I know it's the belief that women should never show daring in front of men. Never be bold when men hesitate. I know flight is not the answer; even to save our lives. ~ Empress Theodora

The most alluring thing a woman can have is confidence. ~ Beyonce Knowles

Healing begins at truth-telling. Tame your emotions and focus on what matters. ~ Jo Ann Fore

You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you rooted for the following, in this order: women of color, black men, and white women, before, finally, white men - which meant you never rooted for white men. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Black women are going to have to take more leadership. I think we are prepared because we bring a tenaciousness with us. We do not fear losing friends, allies, or jobs. ~ Maxine Waters

Hard work keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and spirit. ~ Helena Rubinstein

I'm convinced that we Black women possess a special indestructible strength that allows us to not only get down, but to get up, to get through, and to get over. ~ Janet Jackson

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. ~ Dennis Prager

I've liked different women at different times in my life. I've been attracted to white women. I've been attracted to black women. I've been attracted to Asian women. I've been attracted to various subspecies of women. I can say with gratitude that I've been able to experiment. ~ Oliver Stone

Morality and righteousness is based on intent, love, and in giving; yet, how is it that we as humans have come to view the act of sex with a different set of arbitrary laws? Specifically pigeonholed as an act between man and women, and with righteousness based on an unsystematic number of people we have slept with; as a civilization we have come to bind society with a set of laws largely advantageous to a specific sex, with the minority heavily antagonized and chastised. The universe knows not what sexual morality is, only what is right and wrong. The same principles that dictate morals also command the virtues of sex. Is it with the right intent? Is it based on love? Is it based on giving? ~ Forrest Curran

I liked the fact that there were so many different representations of black women and black men in the movie. It wasn't like we all had the same agenda. ~ Sanaa Lathan

The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Do you know anyone who would be willing to die to save those five-thousand serial killers?"
"No. Everyone I know is too smart for that!"
"Yet Someone did die to save all of the serial killers, and all of the old women, and all of the soldiers, and all of the babies that the world has ever known. That one is Jesus Christ. He died for you and for me. He died for everyone, because in this world our sin has condemned us to death, and the only way that we can be saved was for someone who was Himself without sin to be willing to die in our place."
Molly was silent. Her bright smile had faded, and she felt tears well up in her eyes. ~ Joyce Swann

Christianity fucked men and women up. Men feel guilty and women have misguided anger. The result, a weak male. Fucking controls on our behaviour. It's like a sickness. A control sickness. ~ Robert Black

No one can define black women but black women. ~ Tamara Winfrey Harris

You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth ~ Anthony Trollope

Children fail to realize that a mother doesn't have to provide their "wants". Her bags are heavy because they are filled by everyone's "wants". There isn't one "want" in the bags a mother is carrying that belongs to her. She looks past her self-fulfillment. She feels as though her wants and needs are not important; therefore, they are never on the list.
Children cannot see past their selfish ways. By law, a parent is supposed to provide shelter, food, clothing, make sure their children attend schools and have their annual health checkups. A mother isn't required to put her children in extracurricular activities; that is a choice.
Friends come and go; a marriage may last or fail, but once you're a mother there is no such thing as divorcing your children. Being a mother is the hardest job ever; it is "till death do you part". As a mother, you try your best to make sure your children do not make the same mistakes that you did. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

If God is good, and if He wants us to subdue this planet, and if He wants us to obey the Great Commission and conquer this world for Christ, and if He tells half the human race that they're in charge of tending the home, it follows from this that the home is actually one of the most strategic and important tools by which the world will be won. ~ Rebekah Merkle

You are the light of the world. Shine brightly. Smile beautifully! Rejoice daily! ~ Brenda M. McGraw

She had something more than material value ~ she had a soul, no money could buy. ~ Nikki Rowe

I hope, you find the strength to let go of what hurts you. I hope, you realize that pain is simple, what breaks you, won't heal you. I hope you'll realize, that love is simple because what really loves you, won't leave you. ~ Ventum

These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston's own grain. She saw things otherwise: "When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!" This is exactly right. No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora - of whatever color or background or gender. ~ Zadie Smith

Even when things are at their worst, I refuse to believe all is lost. I will never go down without a fight. ~ Jacquelyn Middleton

Breastfeeding is a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful things that exist in nature. Think about how a woman can literally feed her baby with her body! In my eyes, this is a certain form of beauty, of divinity! To know that my body can not only form and bring another human being into the world, but that I can actually feed babies with my own milk from my own breasts - that puts me in a state of awe each time I think about it. It is an honour to be a woman. ~ C. JoyBell C.

You can fall, but you can rise also. ~ Angelique Kidjo