Maya Angelou Quotes
Poet
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
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.
Nothing will work unless you do.
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.
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
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.
Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.
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.
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.
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
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.
The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
I created myself. I have taught myself so much.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
All great achievements require time.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
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.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
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.
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.
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.
It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
I believe that every person is born with talent.
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
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.
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.
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.
All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
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.
I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.
The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.
Life loves the liver of it.
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.
Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
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.
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.
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.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.
The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
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.
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.'
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
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.'
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.
I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.
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.
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.
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
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!
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.'
A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.
At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.
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.
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.
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.
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
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.
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
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.
I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.
I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.
Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
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.
I got my own back.
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.
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.
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.
It's very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.
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.
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.
I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.
Effective action is always unjust.
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.