Phillis Wheatley Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Phillis Wheatley with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom;”
Meaning & context
Wheatley argues from shared human nature that love of liberty is not limited by race, directly challenging the contradiction between professed freedom and slavery.
Source details
Letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, February 11, 1774, published in the Connecticut press and represented by the National Constitution Center. Wheatley’s explicitly religious and natural-rights argument condemns oppression while speaking from the historical context of Atlantic slavery.
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“Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.”
Meaning & context
Wheatley turns Christian doctrine back toward readers who demean Black people, insisting within the poem’s religious framework that racial contempt is incompatible with shared spiritual possibility.
Source details
“On Being Brought from Africa to America,” in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), represented by Project Gutenberg #409. The poem’s eighteenth-century racial and Christian vocabulary is preserved in historical context; interpretation remains attentive to Wheatley’s position as an enslaved Black poet writing for a colonial audience.
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“Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue, On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:”
Meaning & context
Wheatley praises another young Black artist and urges him to continue developing his gifts, linking visual art and poetry through shared creative aspiration.
Source details
“To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,” published in Wheatley’s 1773 Poems and represented by Poetry Foundation. The poem addresses Scipio Moorhead within Wheatley’s explicitly Christian artistic vocabulary; “deathless glories” carries religious as well as artistic meaning.