Top 100 Maya Angelou Quotes
#1. Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It's very clear.
Maya Angelou
#2. They who have health have hope; and they who have hope, have everything.
Maya Angelou
#3. Today, the first & last of every Tree/ Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Maya Angelou
#4. Don't let the incidents which take place in life bring you low. And certainly don't whine. You can be brought low, that's OK, but don't be reduced by them. Just say, 'That's life.'
Maya Angelou
#5. To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents
Maya Angelou
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
#10. There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou
#11. we were right-handed into a dully furnished living room. L.D.
Maya Angelou
#12. If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England - you couldn't have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.
Maya Angelou
#13. When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time.
Maya Angelou
#14. Sometimes all you need in love is to make each other happy, to make each other laugh. So long as you can still do that ten years down the line then I think you're gold. Never let the laughter slip from your relationship.
Maya Angelou
#15. Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.
Maya Angelou
#16. I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.
Maya Angelou
#17. When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep
Maya Angelou
#18. I want to be a good human being. I'm doing my best, and I'm working at it.
Maya Angelou
#19. Whenever something went wrong when I was young - if I had a pimple or if my hair broke - my mom would say, 'Sister mine, I'm going to make you some soup.' And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.
Maya Angelou
#20. I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.
Maya Angelou
#21. Sometimes guns really matter. Protecting those who need protection - children, women, minorities in rough parts of town, old folks living in places where cops aren't nearby. Guns are true empowerment for the powerless.
Maya Angelou
#22. Removed from their own day of glorious release
Maya Angelou
#23. She's one of our fans. She comes to the theater and allows us to curse and berate her, and that's her contribution to our struggle. Roscoe
Maya Angelou
#24. If you're a human being, you can attempt to do what other human beings have done. We don't understand talent any more than we understand electricity.
Maya Angelou
#26. Live life as if it were created just for you.
Maya Angelou
#27. Miss Glory went on to say that the doctor had taken all her lady organs. I reasoned that a pig organ's included the lungs, heart, and liver, so if Mrs. Cullinan was walking around without those essentials, it explained why she drank alcohol out of unmarked bottles. She was keeping herself embalmed.
Maya Angelou
#28. Don't do anything that you think is wrong. Just do what you think is right, and then be ready to back it up even with your life.
Maya Angelou
#29. Parents who tell their offspring that sex is an act performed only for procreation do everyone a serious disservice.
Maya Angelou
#30. When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.
Maya Angelou
#31. The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.
Maya Angelou
#32. Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
Maya Angelou
#33. It was the awakening summer of 1960 and the entire country was in labor. Something wonderful was about to be born, and we were all going to be good parents to the welcome child. Its name was Freedom. Then,
Maya Angelou
#34. Segregation shaped me; education liberated me.
Maya Angelou
#35. I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don't have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things ...
Maya Angelou
#36. In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours.
In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.
Maya Angelou
#37. When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.
Maya Angelou
#38. It is the worst thing you can do, women, is whine, .. I mean the worst. Don't complain, protest.
Maya Angelou
#39. I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
Maya Angelou
#40. If you're serious, you really understand that it's important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you're the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you're funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.
Maya Angelou
#41. Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
Maya Angelou
#42. Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.
Maya Angelou
#43. Depending on who I am talking about or who's talking through me - if the person is a kind of hip-hop, or rhythm and blues person, or if the person is a kind of old-fashion gothic, meaning gothic attitude, then that will determine what form the poem will take.
Maya Angelou
#44. I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time.
Maya Angelou
#45. I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
Maya Angelou
#46. And if a person is religious, I think it's good, it helps you a bit. But if you're not, at least you can have the sense that there is a condition inside you which looks at the stars with amazement and awe.
Maya Angelou
#47. It was a little light, but she aimed it directly at the gloom of ignorance.
Maya Angelou
#48. You can see in others what they don't see in themselves and what the world doesn't see in them,
Maya Angelou
#49. 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
#50. I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.
Maya Angelou
#51. You forgive yourself for every failure because you are trying to do the right thing. God knows that and you know it. Nobody else may know it.
Maya Angelou
#52. I can be changed by what happened to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.
Maya Angelou
#53. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers).
Maya Angelou
#55. Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.
Maya Angelou
#56. A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.
Maya Angelou
#57. The children to whom we read simple stories may or may not show gratitude, but each boon we give strengthens the pillars of the world.
Maya Angelou
#58. I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.
Maya Angelou
#59. The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
Maya Angelou
#60. Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn't accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else's insistence or someone else's whim or convenience.
Maya Angelou
#61. If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I'd hear a loud 'A-hem!' from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.
Maya Angelou
#63. Oh, the holiness of being the injured party.
Maya Angelou
#64. Let the brain go to work, let it meet the heart and you will be able to forgive.
Maya Angelou
#65. 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
#66. I decided I wouldn't pee on her if her heart was on fire.
Maya Angelou
#67. Independence is a heady draft, 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
#68. We are all human; therefore, nothing human can be alien to us.
Maya Angelou
#69. The human heart ... tells us that we are more alike than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou
#70. If I have a monument in this world, it is my son.
Maya Angelou
#71. When was the last time anyone ever told you how important you are?
Maya Angelou
#72. 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
#73. Light and shadow are opposite sides of the same coin. We can illuminate our paths or darken our way. It is a matter of choice.
Maya Angelou
#74. Living well is an art which can be developed.
Maya Angelou
#75. 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
#76. No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
Maya Angelou
#77. I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, "Death, where is thy sting?" with "It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.
Maya Angelou
#78. she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.
Maya Angelou
#79. 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
#80. When I think about myself, I almost laugh myself to death, 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. Sixty
Maya Angelou
#81. 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
#82. Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, 'Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody and they're going to find me out.
Maya Angelou
#83. That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.
Maya Angelou
#84. I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.
Maya Angelou
#85. Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Maya Angelou
#86. I love living. I love that I'm alive to love my age. There are many people who went to bed just as I did yesterday evening and didn't wake this morning. I love and feel very blessed that I did. I love, too, that I know a little more today than I did yesterday, or I simply know it more profoundly.
Maya Angelou
#87. I thank God I'm myself and for the life I'm given to live and for friends and lovers and beloveds, and I thank God for knowing that all those people have already paid for me.
Maya Angelou
#88. I think I have had so much blessing - I've had my brother, who was brilliant - I think my family came closest to making a genius when they made my brother - Bailey was just all of that. He loved me.
Maya Angelou
#89. On the day of your birth, the Creator filled countless storehouses, set aside for your use and yours alone.
Maya Angelou
#90. I know that I'm not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don't know how not to.
Maya Angelou
#91. We all have that possibility, that potential and that promise of seeing beyond the seeming.
Maya Angelou
#92. It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life because, then, young men and women are tempted to believe, well, if he was that great, he's inaccessible, and I can never try to be that or emulate that or achieve that.
Maya Angelou
#93. Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.
Maya Angelou
#94. If we are honest and fair, then we are known by that. If we are not, alas, we are known by that as well. What we want to do is do right, but you have to say it, you have to show it, and not stop.
Maya Angelou
#95. When I was asked to do something good, I often say yes, I'll try, yes, I'll do my best. And part of that is believing, if God loves me, if God made everything from leaves to seals and oak trees, then what is it I can't do?
Maya Angelou
#96. I commend lovers, I am enheartened by lovers, I am encouraged by their courage and inspired by their passion.
Maya Angelou
#97. 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
#98. Shakespeare - I was very influenced - still am - by Shakespeare. I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.
Maya Angelou
#99. The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
Maya Angelou
#100. Y'all dropped the ball and you should be shamed.
Maya Angelou
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