Top 120 Nikki Giovanni Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.”

— Nikki Giovanni

2. “The unwillingness to try is worse than any failure.”

— Nikki Giovanni

3. “The ability to take pride in your own work is one of the hallmarks of sanity.”

— Nikki Giovanni

4. “A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you’re in and take advantage of it.”

— Nikki Giovanni

5. “VISIBILITY – You’ve got to find a way to make people know you’re there.”

— Nikki Giovanni

6. “We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.”

— Nikki Giovanni

Featured in: Strong Quotes

7. “We love because it’s the only true adventure.”

— Nikki Giovanni

8. “If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.”

— Nikki Giovanni

9. “Once you know who you are, you don’t have to worry anymore.”

— Nikki Giovanni

10. “We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.”

— Nikki Giovanni

11. “She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn’t.”

— Nikki Giovanni

12. “Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure.”

— Nikki Giovanni

13. “Deal with yourself as a individual, worthy of respect and make everyone else deal with you the same way.”

— Nikki Giovanni

14. “We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.”

— Nikki Giovanni

15. “Black love is black wealth.”

— Nikki Giovanni

16. “If now isn’t a good time for the truth I don’t see when we’ll get to it.”

— Nikki Giovanni

17. “I would put books on par with chocolate, because a good book is delicious.”

— Nikki Giovanni

18. “Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans resist change. Change will occur; vacuums will be filled.”

— Nikki Giovanni

19. “Poems don’t have to rhyme. Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.”

— Nikki Giovanni

20. “Who I am really keeps surprising me.”

— Nikki Giovanni

21. “I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

— Nikki Giovanni

22. “Black love is Black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.”

— Nikki Giovanni

23. “Death is a slave’s freedom.”

— Nikki Giovanni

24. “Some say we are responsible for those we love. Others know we are responsible for those who love us.”

— Nikki Giovanni

25. “I am so hip even my errors are correct.”

— Nikki Giovanni

26. “Nothing is easy to the unwilling.”

— Nikki Giovanni

27. “You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you’ll never write.”

— Nikki Giovanni

28. “Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.”

— Nikki Giovanni

29. “There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”

— Nikki Giovanni

30. “I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”

— Nikki Giovanni

31. “We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I’ll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn’t. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.”

— Nikki Giovanni

32. “A lot of people refuse to do things because they don’t want to go naked, don’t want to go without guarantee. But that’s what’s got to happen. You go naked until you die.”

— Nikki Giovanni

33. “Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message – beats, lyrics, singers, bass players – anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.”

— Nikki Giovanni

34. “Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.”

— Nikki Giovanni

Featured in: Reading Quotes

35. “I am a huge fan of the Black woman. I never hesitate to recommend her when times are bad or things go wrong.”

— Nikki Giovanni

36. “Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.”

— Nikki Giovanni

37. “The only way you can grow is to let yourself make mistakes and create contradictions. As we learn new things, some of our old attitudes will change.”

— Nikki Giovanni

38. “A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.”

— Nikki Giovanni

39. “Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.”

— Nikki Giovanni

40. “We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.”

— Nikki Giovanni

41. “I appreciate and enjoy my age.”

— Nikki Giovanni

42. “We in the Black Arts movement, which wasn’t really a movement but a group of people who had similar objectives...”

— Nikki Giovanni

43. “To write poems, I think it’s important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.”

— Nikki Giovanni

Featured in: Reading Quotes

44. “The more you love someone the more he wants from you and the less you have to give since you’ve already given him your love.”

— Nikki Giovanni

45. “The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.”

— Nikki Giovanni

46. “Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.”

— Nikki Giovanni

47. “White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.”

— Nikki Giovanni

48. “Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It’s your life and you can’t let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.”

— Nikki Giovanni

49. “I love you because no two snowflakes are alike, and it is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops.”

— Nikki Giovanni

50. “Show me someone not full of herself and I’ll show you a hungry person.”

— Nikki Giovanni