MAN CODES

Sidney Poitier

MAN CODES: QUOTES BY SIDNEY POITIER

“Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment.” “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.” “My mother chose to teach me that sometimes gratification has to be delayed.” “A man the South African government evidently thought too dangerous to be free, but also by then too prominent to be killed.”

“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.” “When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours. “I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was… a human being.” “I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it.”

“We’re all somewhat courageous, and we’re all considerably cowardly. We’re all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.” “In my case, the body of work stands for itself… I think my work has been representative of me as a man.”

Compiled by Bilal S. Akram