110+ Langston Hughes Quotes On Education, Racism And Writing

Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. He is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance, a period of tremendous artistic and intellectual creativity among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Langston Hughes on love, education, racism.

Top 10 Langston Hughes Quotes

1. I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?
2. I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
3. A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the Earth And every man is free.
4. I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.
5. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
6. Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
7. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
8. Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.
9. Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.
10. When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Langston Hughes Image Quotes

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul. — Langston Hughes

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe. — Langston Hughes

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Short Quotes

• Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
• I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.
• I wish the rent Was heaven sent.
• I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
• My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
• Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
• Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
• The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.
• Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first -- before it boomerangs.
• For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

Langston Hughes Quotes About Love

Gather up In the arms of your love—Those who expect No love from above. — Langston Hughes

Out of love, No regrets-- Though the goodness Be wasted forever. Out of love, No regrets-- Though the return Be never. — Langston Hughes

I loved my friendHe went away from meThere's nothing more to sayThe poem ends soft as it began -I loved my friend. — Langston Hughes

While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve and hate will die unborn. Love and chains are broken. — Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. The rain makes running pools in the gutter. The rain plays a little sellp-song on our roof at night- And I love the rain. — Langston Hughes

Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung. To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven. — Langston Hughes

7 x 7 + love = An amount Infinitely above: 7 x 7 - love. — Langston Hughes

So since I'm still here livin', I guess I will live on. I could've died for love-- But for livin' I was born. — Langston Hughes

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. — Langston Hughes

Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Writing

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything. — Langston Hughes

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America. — Langston Hughes

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing. — Langston Hughes

To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man. — Langston Hughes

I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer. — Langston Hughes

I must never write when I do not want to write. — Langston Hughes

Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying. — Langston Hughes

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Dreams

I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world! — Langston Hughes

Gather out of star-dust, Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, Storm-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust, Not for sale. — Langston Hughes

Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown. — Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. — Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly. — Langston Hughes

Good morning, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? • • • • You think It's a happy beat? — Langston Hughes

Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace. — Langston Hughes

When dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird which cannot fly. — Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry uplike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a soreAnd then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar overlike a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sagslike a heavy lead. Or does it explode? — Langston Hughes

A dream deferred is a dream denied. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Freedom

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe. — Langston Hughes

Words Like Freedom There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say. On my heartstrings freedom sings All day everyday. There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. If you had known what I know You would know why. — Langston Hughes

There is no color line in death. I swear to the lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath - America will be! I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe. — Langston Hughes

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! True anyhow no matter how many Liars use those words. — Langston Hughes

Frosting Freedom Is just frosting On somebody else's Cake-- And so must be Till we Learn how to Bake. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About America

America never was America to me And yet I swear this oath - America will be! — Langston Hughes

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again! — Langston Hughes

This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible. — Langston Hughes

Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours. — Langston Hughes

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. — Langston Hughes

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. — Langston Hughes

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind. — Langston Hughes

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed - Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. — Langston Hughes

But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Equality

Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding. — Langston Hughes

Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well. — Langston Hughes

Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer? — Langston Hughes

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Inspiring

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid. — Langston Hughes

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion. — Langston Hughes

Good morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Negro

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter. — Langston Hughes

If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed. — Langston Hughes

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall. — Langston Hughes

I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long. — Langston Hughes

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. — Langston Hughes

Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine. — Langston Hughes

The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror. — Langston Hughes

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line. — Langston Hughes

To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!' — Langston Hughes

One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About Life

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair — Langston Hughes

Life is an egg you have to be patient and careful with it or it will break. — Langston Hughes

Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling. — Langston Hughes

The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm — Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. — Langston Hughes

Life dosent frighten me at all. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Quotes About People

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.- — Langston Hughes

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas — Langston Hughes

To some people Love is given, To others Only Heaven. — Langston Hughes

It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been. — Langston Hughes

It is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!" — Langston Hughes

Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going. — Langston Hughes

Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves. — Langston Hughes

Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness. — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Famous Quotes And Sayings

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it ... what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you. — Langston Hughes

Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism. — Langston Hughes

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul. — Langston Hughes

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe. — Langston Hughes

Looks like what drives me crazy Don't have no effect on you-- But I'm gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too. — Langston Hughes

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair — Langston Hughes

I stay cool, and dig all jive, That's the way I stay alive. My motto, as I live and learn, is Dig and be dug In return. — Langston Hughes

Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen! — Langston Hughes

I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that's in my mind. — Langston Hughes

They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house. — Langston Hughes

No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any more that she can be witty by only the help of speech. — Langston Hughes

Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along. — Langston Hughes

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police. — Langston Hughes

Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection. — Langston Hughes

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas. — Langston Hughes

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home. — Langston Hughes

Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me — Langston Hughes

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. — Langston Hughes

Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry-- I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die. — Langston Hughes

I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. — Langston Hughes

Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest. — Langston Hughes

Believing everything she read In the daily news, (No in-between to choose) She thought that only One side won, Not that BOTH Might lose. — Langston Hughes

Everything there is but lovin' leaves a rust on your old soul — Langston Hughes

Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it. — Langston Hughes

Wear it Like a banner For the proud? Not like a shroud. — Langston Hughes

Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language. — Langston Hughes

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges. — Langston Hughes

A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around. — Langston Hughes

My personal experience has been that in my 25 years of writing, I have not been asked to do more than four or five commercial one-shot scripts. These were performed on major national hook-ups but produced for me no immediate additional jobs or requests. One script for BBC was done around the world with an all-star cast. — Langston Hughes

Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat. — Langston Hughes

Your explanation depresses me," I said. "Your nonsense depresses me," said Simple. — Langston Hughes

When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left. — Langston Hughes

Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants. — Langston Hughes

We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. — Langston Hughes

The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it. — Langston Hughes

Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives. — Langston Hughes

Reach Up Your Hand... and take a star. — Langston Hughes

Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. — Langston Hughes

It's such a Bore Being always Poor. — Langston Hughes

Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything." — Langston Hughes

Road's in front o' me, Nothin' to do but walk. — Langston Hughes

One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help. — Langston Hughes

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself — Langston Hughes

Gather quickly Out of darkness All the songs you know And throw them at the sun Before they melt Like snow. — Langston Hughes

Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory. — Langston Hughes

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself. — Langston Hughes

Life Lessons by Langston Hughes

1. Langston Hughes emphasizes the importance of resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity, encouraging us to keep striving for our dreams no matter how difficult the journey may be.
2. He also encourages us to embrace our unique identities and stand up for ourselves in the face of oppression and racism.
3. Finally, Hughes reminds us to appreciate the beauty of life and to find joy in the small moments, even when faced with difficult circumstances.