Nelle Harper Lee (April 28th, 1926 – February 19th, 2016) was an American writer whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic. She was good friends with Truman Capote and helped with his research for the book In Cold Blood.
To Kill a Mockingbird is loosely based on her experiences growing up in Monroeville, Alabama. The novel deals with race and class in the Deep South during the 1930s, as perceived through the eyes of two children.
Lee received many accolades and honorary degrees for her contribution to literature.
Below we list some words of wisdom by Nelle Harper Lee.
“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”— Harper Lee, quoted in Newquist, 1964
“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
“As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.”
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
“A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”
“It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike–in the second place, folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.”
“Don’t you study about other folks’ business till you take care of your own.”
“You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that’s the way I want to live.”
“Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.”
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”
“Things are always better in the morning.”
“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.”
“It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.”
“Things are never as bad as they seem.”
“Try fighting with your head for a change… it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.”
“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
“There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
“We’re paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.”
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”
“Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”
“With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.”
“There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.”
“You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
Copyright © 2026 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo
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