Top 1076 Quotes & Sayings by Maya Angelou
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Maya Angelou.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
All great achievements require time.
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
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.
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.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
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.
I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.
The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
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.
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 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.
A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.
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.
Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.
Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
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.
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
I got my own back.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
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.
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
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.
I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.
It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
I believe that every person is born with talent.
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.
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.'
I'm interested in women's health because I'm a woman. I'd be a darn fool not to be on my own side.
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.
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.
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
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.
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.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
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 not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
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.
Life loves the liver of it.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Nothing will work unless you do.
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.
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up.
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