Maya Angelou

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning
Maya Angelou

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
Maya Angelou

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Maya Angelou

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Maya Angelou

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the treads of that tapestry are equal in value no matter their color.
Maya Angelou

I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people.
Maya Angelou

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
Maya Angelou

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou

Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.
Maya Angelou

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou

The whites were really brutishly ignorant, blitheringly, so they killed people sometimes - just came into the African-American community and maimed people because they didn't agree with God's choice for the colors of the people's skin.
Maya Angelou

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Maya Angelou

The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
Maya Angelou

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Maya Angelou

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
Maya Angelou

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.
Maya Angelou

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
Maya Angelou

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
Maya Angelou

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
Maya Angelou

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder? in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever. That black woman is integral, if not a most important part of the family unit.
Maya Angelou

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
Maya Angelou

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
Maya Angelou

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
Maya Angelou

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, ?I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway?.
Maya Angelou

Effective action is always unjust.
Maya Angelou

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
Maya Angelou

I answer the heroic question ?Death, where is they sting?? with ?It is here in my heart and mind and memories?.
Maya Angelou

I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating.
Maya Angelou

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou

Life loves the liver of it.
Maya Angelou

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: 'I'm with you kid. Let's go?.
Maya Angelou

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.
Maya Angelou

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence - neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish - it is an imponderably valuable gift.
Maya Angelou

Forgive yourself - no-one else will.
Maya Angelou

I'm convinced that I'm a child of God. That's wonderful, exhilarating, liberating, full of promise. But the burden which goes along with that is, I'm convinced that everybody is a child of God. . . . I weep a lot. I thank God I laugh a lot, too. The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
Maya Angelou

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.
Maya Angelou

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.
Maya Angelou

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.
Maya Angelou

Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.
Maya Angelou

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
Maya Angelou

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
Maya Angelou

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
Maya Angelou

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Maya Angelou

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Maya Angelou

In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric.
Maya Angelou

All great achievements require time.
Maya Angelou

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
Maya Angelou

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
Maya Angelou

Let me tell young people this - you may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter some defeats to know who you are.
Maya Angelou

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
Maya Angelou

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
Maya Angelou

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
Maya Angelou

Don't bring negative to my door.
Maya Angelou

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.
Maya Angelou

Don't bring negative to my door.
Maya Angelou

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.
Maya Angelou

Each of us, famous or infamous, is a role model for somebody, and if we aren't, we should behave as though we are?cheerful, kind, loving, courteous. Because you can be sure someone is watching and taking deliberate and diligent notes.
Maya Angelou

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
Maya Angelou

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Maya Angelou

Nothing will work unless you do.
Maya Angelou

I believe that every person is born with talent.
Maya Angelou

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The needs of society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is the one who is offered only crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence, the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic of buys forty- dollar shoes is not criticized but appreciated.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curries and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) were going to try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Lewises.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
Maya Angelou, When I Think About Myself