The Good Person: Excerpts from the Yoruba is a compilation of hundreds of Yoruba proverbs. This resource was created by the late Oyekan Owomoyela, who taught African Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was a leading scholar on Yoruba literary forms. Owomoyela writes in his introduction to this project, "[b]elieving that it carries great psychic properties, the Yoruba approach speech with deliberate care, taking great pains to avoid careless, casual, or thoughtless statements whose damage might outlast lifetimes." Proverbs, Owomoyela goes on to note, play a central role in Yoruba speech. In this collection, proverbs are organized into six thematic categories. These categories include: "On humility, self-control, self-knowledge, self-respect, and self-restraint;" "On perspicaciousness (good judgment, perceptiveness), reasonableness, sagacity, savoir-faire, wisdom, and worldly wisdom;" and "On consideration, kindness, and thoughtfulness." Within each of these six categories, proverbs are organized alphabetically. Each Yoruba proverb is accompanied by both an English translation and a note about the proverb's meaning.