Mae Jemison Quotes

Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.

Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations. If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out...You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.

It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison

Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.

I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action.

The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination. Never limit others because of your own limited imagination.

Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.

As a child, Jemison possessed a voracious desire to not only know about the world, but to do things in it.

By turns a medical doctor, engineer, Third World nation healthcare worker, space explorer, political activist, media personality, writer and dancer, Jemison shows that the drive to know more about the universe does not need to come from a cold place of calculating conquest; it can be the ultimate expression of artistic, intellectual and humanitarian drives all pulling together towards a more equitable future.

It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. ~Mae Jemison

The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing.

I knew as a 10-year-old Black girl that I was not precious to these adults. I believed they would kill me as readily as they would kill the Viet Cong the US was at war with. It didn't matter that I was a United States citizen. It didn't matter that I was very smart, would probably grow up to be pretty like my mother, or that I was fun to talk to and had unlimited potential. It didn't matter that I was a good girl and hadn't been suspended from school. It didn't matter because I didn't matter to them.