Life Beyond Measure Quotes

“A tiny bit of myself is lost when my friends are gone. A tiny bit of myself was lost when my brothers, all but one, passed away.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“We fight good wars in medical laboratories, endlessly seeking to cure the scourges of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mental illness. We fight good wars when we devote time, energy, and money to relieve the suffering of hungry people around the world. We fight good wars when we come to the aid of those struck by the overwhelming forces of capricious nature: fire, flood, drought, hurricanes, and earthquakes. We fight good wars when we refuse to allow injustice to be done to others. We fight good wars when we oppose hate, bigotry, and ignorance. These”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“But there is one key ingredient that my wife has helped me to recognize over the years, and that is the importance of articulating love for one another on a daily basis. The words I love you, spoken in acknowledgment in the morning upon rising and before going to bed, or when sitting down to dine, make the most beautiful music recognized by human ears.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“The willingness to receive help and appreciate its value when it arrives, sometimes unannounced, is a subject that returns us to the question of why and how our lives turn out as they do.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“The great disease of mankind is ignorance.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“I’m telling you this so that if you ever are in the position of carrying a secret about something that you have done that makes you ashamed you will make the choice to confront yourself. It will take guts to admit that you have behaved in a way that prevents you from being your better self, and then choose to act differently. It”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“We are what we are, and half of what we are is what we are not.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“fear is a visceral response to imminent jeopardy, real or perceived, threatening to come crashing down on you with devastating results. Undoubtedly”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” he said. “I want to achieve it by not dying.” But”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“As a chief justice of the United States once said, blacks were three-fifths of a human, and only a full human being should have rights, the implication being that three-fifths of a human being was something fit to function only as a beast of burden. Well, that is a distortion exposing the enemies of logic and reason, and among them are mass hysteria, hate, prejudice, and ignorance. With”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“It is not a bad idea, Ayele, as you grow into adulthood, to fix your eye on people of your parents’ generation, or perhaps those even older, to find those you can admire for their qualities of character and contribution. Heroes and role models are important, especially because when you think of them they have the ability to buoy your spirits and ignite your energies to move you onward. In”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“behind each word is a meaning. Some words are friendly; some are not. Some will cause you pain. Some will make you cry. Some will protect you. Some will deceive you. Still, words and their meaning can be indispensable in preparing you for the battles you must win in order to survive. The”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“Even if you are someone used to wearing armor, guarded and afraid, I think love is such a strong force it would find a way through your protective guard. It will get to your heart, and you can’t put any fences around that. As much as you might try, you simply can’t. You’re going to have other forces that will be operative at the same time if it is right for you to fall in love with this activity or individual or cause or process. There”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“We all have a capacity for love, for kindness, for passion. We also have a capacity for the opposite, but love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, although they exist as equal opposites.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“Stay from underfoot and don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?” “Yes, ma’am, I hear you.” Due to past experience, she may not have completely believed me. When”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“The cold hard fact of courage is that it has to spring from within. Because it's opposite, fear, lives inside of us as well...fear really is alive, even when it's just sitting there, free from its influence. Still we are aware how dangerous it is. How debilitating it is, how crippling and how it stops us some times.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Ganddaughter: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter by Sidney Poitier

“And nature doesn't tell you, "I'm going to have one of my guys tap you on the shoulder, and everything is going to be all right for the rest of the day.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“For somewhere in the back of my mind is that odd explanation that if you whisper a sentence in the ear of one person around a table of many - a short sentence such as "John slept close to a woman with whom he worked" - as those words go around the table, whispered to each person next to another, it might come out, less than a minute later, that John was a sleep-arounder, and he did it with every woman he knew; which meant he probably was gay, because he needed to give the impression of being a raging heterosexual.

Now, if that could happen in one minute, think of the long history of most faiths.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“No one knows all that there is to know. (This despite Mark Twain’s observation that between him and Albert Einstein, they encompassed all human knowledge. As he put it, “Einstein knows all that there is to know, and I know the rest.”) The task is to learn as much as you can about as much as you can; the great disease of mankind is ignorance. With”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“As a society we have grown to prefer the easy over the difficult, the quick over the slow, the cheap over the costly—and those choices are not often to the benefit of nature. Lord”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“I am not suggesting that you devote your life to being a missionary. You are entitled to your share of love and joy and leisure and pure happiness. But within the warm periphery of your life, there should be room for passionate involvement. As the Italian poet Antonio Porchia put it: “In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.” Racial,”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“We had our chances. While the early wars were often fought between tribes or nations who knew nothing of each other and feared each other’s strange looks, customs, and unknown powers, much of that changed over time. In the wars of my time, while people spoke different languages, nations were no longer fighting total strangers. We knew, at least, the overwhelming similarities of the various members of the human family. Beyond our mutual need for food, water, and air, we knew that even among our enemies there were similarities of love, kindness, religious worship, and reverence for children as inheritors of our space on earth. But”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before. I”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“They have never found that area within themselves where they can be peaceful with who they are, what they are, and where they are. In”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“There is a sense of self, of character, and of personal self-worth and kindness and hopefulness and embrace that is characteristic of such people, educated and noneducated alike. My”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“They knew that they were there in the Bahamas because their forefathers had been captured and put on ships and transported to a different part of the world. They knew that those ancestors had a history and a culture, and they talked about that history and culture. Through oral history, they retained some of the fragments of who their great-great-grandfathers were, and probably even some surviving words of their language. They”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“Now more than ever, we must look to our artists to be our truthtellers and to challenge us toward creative solutions to the many problems mankind faces. As”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“In Africa, there are still more men, if you’re looking for courage. There, a few years back, the colonial powers were the ones who owned the government, who owned the guns—the ones who were responsible for whether you ate, had a job, whether your children got an education, or whether you lived or died. But that colonial system was challenged by, in addition to Nelson Mandela, men like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and men in others places. They knew that the authorities would try to eliminate them.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter

“a man the South African government evidently thought too dangerous to be free, but also by then too prominent to be killed.”
― Sidney Poitier, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter