Top 150 Booker T. Washington Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Positive Quotes, Quotes About Strength, Empowerment Quotes

2. “Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Short Positive Quotes, Helping Others Quotes, Compassion Quotes, Being Happy Quotes, Quotes About People

3. “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Blessing Quotes, Empathy Quotes, Impact Quotes, Be Kind Quotes, Helping Others Quotes

4. “Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.”

— Booker T. Washington

5. “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.”

— Booker T. Washington

6. “Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than to be in bad company.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Friends Quotes, Toxic People Quotes

7. “I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Life is Hard Quotes, Obstacles Quotes, Resilience Quotes, Grit Quotes

8. “Living is the art of loving. Loving is the art of caring. Caring is the art of sharing. Sharing is the art of living. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Caring Quotes, Volunteer Quotes

9. “I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.”

— Booker T. Washington

10. “Success is not measured by where you are in life, but the obstacles you’ve over come.”

— Booker T. Washington

11. “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”

— Booker T. Washington

12. “Success always leaves footprints.”

— Booker T. Washington

13. “Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Life is Hard Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students, Grit Quotes, Uplifting Quotes

14. “Start where you are with what you have, knowing that what you have is plenty enough.”

— Booker T. Washington

15. “We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.”

— Booker T. Washington

16. “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

— Booker T. Washington

17. “The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate.”

— Booker T. Washington

18. “Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”

— Booker T. Washington

19. “You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.”

— Booker T. Washington

20. “The circumstances that surround a man’s life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.”

— Booker T. Washington

21. “Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”

— Booker T. Washington

22. “Education is not a thing apart from life – not a “system,” nor a philosophy; it is direct teaching how to live and how to work.”

— Booker T. Washington

23. “Success waits patiently for anyone who has the determination and strength to seize it.”

— Booker T. Washington

24. “Holding a grudge does not hurt the person against whom the grudge is held, it hurts the one who holds it.”

— Booker T. Washington

25. “Character is power.”

— Booker T. Washington

26. “I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.”

— Booker T. Washington

27. “There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”

— Booker T. Washington

28. “Never let your work drive you. Master it and keep it in complete control.”

— Booker T. Washington

29. “It often requires more courage to suffer in silence than to rebel, more courage not to strike back than to retaliate, more courage to be silent than to speak.”

— Booker T. Washington

30. “Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”

— Booker T. Washington

31. “No one can degrade us except ourselves.”

— Booker T. Washington

32. “You may fill your heads with knowledge or skillfully train your hands, but unless it is based upon high, upright character, upon a true heart, it will amount to nothing. You will be no better than the most ignorant.”

— Booker T. Washington

33. “I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I resolved then that I would permit no man, no matter what his color, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

— Booker T. Washington

34. “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

— Booker T. Washington

35. “I think I have learned that the best way to lift one’s self up is to help someone else.”

— Booker T. Washington

36. “An inch of progress is worth a yard of complaint.”

— Booker T. Washington

37. “The thing to do when one feels sure that he has said or done the right thing and is condemned, is to stand still and keep quiet. If he is right, time will show it.”

— Booker T. Washington

38. “You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.”

— Booker T. Washington

39. “If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.”

— Booker T. Washington

40. “I shall never permit myself to stoop so low as to hate any man.”

— Booker T. Washington

41. “I believe that any man’s life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high-water mark of pure and useful living.”

— Booker T. Washington

42. “We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

— Booker T. Washington

43. “Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.”

— Booker T. Washington

44. “We shall prosper as we learn to do the common things of life in an uncommon way. Let down your buckets where you are.”

— Booker T. Washington

45. “Every person who has grown to any degree of usefulness, every person who has grown to distinction, almost without exception has been a person who has risen by overcoming obstacles, by removing difficulties, by resolving that when he met discouragement he would not give up.”

— Booker T. Washington

46. “The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.”

— Booker T. Washington

Featured in: Book Quotes

47. “We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.”

— Booker T. Washington

48. “We must not only become reliable, progressive, skillful and intelligent, but we must keep the idea constantly before our youths that all forms of labor, whether with the hand or head, are honorable.”

— Booker T. Washington

49. “At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.”

— Booker T. Washington

50. “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”

— Booker T. Washington