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Maya Angelou Quotes

Poet
Born On
1928-04-04
Died On
2014-05-28
Birth Place
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Death Place
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States
Birth Sign
aries
Father
Bailey Johnson
Mother
Vivian Baxter Johnson
Spouse
Enistasious Tosh Angelos, Paul du Feu
Nationality
American
Education
George Washington High School, California Labor School

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.

Maya Angelou

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Nothing will work unless you do.

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

Maya Angelou

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Maya Angelou

I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place.

Maya Angelou

Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.

Maya Angelou

You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

Maya Angelou

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Maya Angelou

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

Maya Angelou

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

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

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

Maya Angelou

I created myself. I have taught myself so much.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

All great achievements require time.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

Maya Angelou

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.

Maya Angelou

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

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

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

Maya Angelou

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

Maya Angelou

I work very hard, and I play very hard. I'm grateful for life. And I live it - I believe life loves the liver of it. I live it.

Maya Angelou

I'm convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they're stones that don't matter. As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to do some good.

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

It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

Maya Angelou

I believe that every person is born with talent.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

Maya Angelou

I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I'm praying, but also something wonderful happens to me. I'm grateful that I'm heard.

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

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.

Maya Angelou

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.

Maya Angelou

I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.

Maya Angelou

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

Maya Angelou

Life loves the liver of it.

Maya Angelou

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

Maya Angelou

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Achievement
Maya Angelou

What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.

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

In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Maya Angelou

The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.

Maya Angelou

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

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

You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

Maya Angelou

Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, 'I'm not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.' Timidity keeps people from their good. They are afraid to say, 'Yes, I deserve it.'

Maya Angelou

Eating is so intimate. It's very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you're inviting a person into your life.

Maya Angelou

I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.

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

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

Maya Angelou

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

Maya Angelou

We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay - and rise!

Maya Angelou

That's the biggest gift I can give anybody: 'Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you're doing and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.'

Maya Angelou

A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.

Maya Angelou

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

Maya Angelou

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

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

The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God - if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That's what I think.

Maya Angelou

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

Maya Angelou

If we don't plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don't have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don't have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

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

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men... We are who we are because they were who they were. It's wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

Maya Angelou

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Maya Angelou

A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

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

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

Maya Angelou

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

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

I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.

Maya Angelou

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

I like chicken a lot because chicken is generous - that is to say, it's obedient. It will do whatever you tell it to do.

Maya Angelou

I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

Maya Angelou

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.

Maya Angelou

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

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

I got my own back.

Maya Angelou

I'm considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I've never been bored in my life.

Maya Angelou

Independence is a heady draught, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.

Maya Angelou

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

Maya Angelou

The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.

Maya Angelou

It's very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.

Maya Angelou

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

Maya Angelou

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

Maya Angelou

I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.

Maya Angelou

Effective action is always unjust.

Maya Angelou

All of us knows, not what is expedient, not what is going to make us popular, not what the policy is, or the company policy - but in truth each of us knows what is the right thing to do. And that's how I am guided.

Maya Angelou