Top 100 Best Maya Angelou Quotes
#1. The only thing is, people have to develop courage. It is most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can't practice any other virtues consistently.
Maya Angelou
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.
Maya Angelou
#6. I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young,
Maya Angelou
#7. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#8. 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
#9. The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear.
Maya Angelou
#10. This a a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before.
Maya Angelou
#11. When teachers or people in authority put me down or in one way or another tried to make me feel less than equal to what they thought I should be - my mother was on my side. It was amazing.
Maya Angelou
#12. Every December, I host a tree-trimming party. I serve chili with cornbread and lots of good wine. It's a wonderful party, and it shows how much adults like to play.
Maya Angelou
#13. All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open.
Maya Angelou
#14. The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.
Maya Angelou
#15. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.
Maya Angelou
#16. Like most children, I thought if I could face the worst danger voluntarily, and triumph, I would forever have power over it.
Maya Angelou
#17. Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It's very clear.
Maya Angelou
#18. They who have health have hope; and they who have hope, have everything.
Maya Angelou
#19. Today, the first & last of every Tree/ Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Maya Angelou
#20. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#21. Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.
Maya Angelou
#22. If you have a song to sing, who are you not to open your mouth and sing to the world?
Maya Angelou
#23. 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
#25. There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Maya Angelou
#27. The question is not how to survive, but how to thrive with passion, compassion, humor and style.
Maya Angelou
#29. I think I know that I deserve better. And so I try for better. I'm never so put off that I would ever walk out of a place not having tried the best I could.
Maya Angelou
#30. You want me to do something ... tell me I can't do it.
Maya Angelou
#31. Because of technological breakthroughs, the society will need fewer and fewer unskilled laborers.
Maya Angelou
#32. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency
Maya Angelou
#33. Sometimes you have to defend yourself from yourself. When
Maya Angelou
#34. People are too busy putting things under microscopes and so forth. Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts.
Maya Angelou
#35. To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents
Maya Angelou
#36. 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
#37. I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes.
Maya Angelou
#38. 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
#39. Cotton rows crisscross the world
And dead-tired nights of yearning
Thunderbolts on leather strops
And all my body burning
Sugar cane reach up to God
And every baby crying
Shame a blanket of my night
And all my days are dying
Maya Angelou
#40. I know that I've been guided by God. I am obedient.
Maya Angelou
#42. Some decide that happiness and glee are the same thing, they are not. When we choose happiness we accept the responsibility to lighten the load of someone else and to be a light on the path of another who may be walking in darkness.
Maya Angelou
#43. Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.
Maya Angelou
#44. It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou
#45. 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
#46. It is better to control oneself, if one can, and not hit back. But on certain occasions, it is imperative to defend oneself. I don't think it's fair to ask anybody not to defend herself or himself.
Maya Angelou
#47. I'm working at trying to be a Christian, and that's serious business. It's like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy - it's serious business.
Maya Angelou
#48. 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
#49. 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.
Jasinda Wilder
#50. Then go to my room where solitude gaped whale-jawed wide to swallow me entire.
Maya Angelou
#51. Mother's life flowed radiant. Flourescent-tipped waves on incoming tides.
Maya Angelou
#53. It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
Maya Angelou
#54. Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable. Curly
Maya Angelou
#55. What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,'.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.
Maya Angelou
#56. The Holy Spirit upon my left leads my feet without ceasing into the camp of the righteous and into the tents of the free.
Maya Angelou
#57. In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.
Maya Angelou
#58. The weight of appreciation and the threat, which was never spoken, of a return to Momma were burdens that clogged my childish wits into impassivity.
Maya Angelou
#61. When I try to describe myself to God I say, "Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?" And I almost always get God's attention.
Maya Angelou
#62. Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.
Maya Angelou
#63. I'm very, very serious - I'm serious enough not to take myself too seriously. That means I can be completely wedded to the moment. But when I leave that moment, I want to be completely wedded to the next moment.
Maya Angelou
#64. My mind struck a truth as an elbow can strike a table edge.
Maya Angelou
#65. Will I be less dead because I wrote this poem or you more because you read it long years hence.
Maya Angelou
#66. Love liberates. It doesn't just hold, that's ego. Love liberates.
Maya Angelou
#67. The area where we are the greatest is the area in which we inspire, encourage and connect with another human being.
Maya Angelou
#68. I wouldn't trade anything for my story now.
Maya Angelou
#69. America was aptly described by George Bernard Shaw, who said that it was 'the only country which had gone from barbarism to decadence without once passing through civilization.' Guy
Maya Angelou
#70. In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then?
Maya Angelou
#71. I have found that the platonic affection
in friendships and familial
love for children can be relied upon
with certainty to lift the bruised soul
and repair the wounded spirit
Maya Angelou
#72. We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou
#73. She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.
Maya Angelou
#74. I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.
Maya Angelou
#75. I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.
Maya Angelou
#76. Don't get older just to get wiser. If you get older, you will be wiser, I believe that - if you dare. But get older because it's fun!
Maya Angelou
#77. The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
Maya Angelou
#78. You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
#79. I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now.
Maya Angelou
#80. The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.
Maya Angelou
#81. He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.
Maya Angelou
#82. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.
Maya Angelou
#83. Stand up straight and realize who you are, that you tower over your circumstances. You are a child of God. Stand up straight.
Maya Angelou
#84. I am not competing with anyone other than myself. I want to be excellent at whatever I do.
Maya Angelou
#85. I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'
Maya Angelou
#86. If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.
Maya Angelou
#87. I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
Maya Angelou
#88. We are loved by Love itself. There is nothing good that we can't do.
Maya Angelou
#89. I have heard it said that winter, too, will pass, that spring is a sign that summer is due at last. See, all we have to do is hang on.
Maya Angelou
#91. Exchange love for hate ... Thereby, making the present comfortable and the future promising.
Maya Angelou
#93. There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou
#94. Trust your brain to suggest a solution, then have the courage to follow through.
Maya Angelou
#95. Moderation in all things. And even moderation in moderation. Don't get too much moderation, you know?
Maya Angelou
#96. My great blessing is my son, but I have daughters. I have white ones and Black ones and fat ones and thin ones and pretty ones and plain. I have gay ones and straight. I have daughters. I have Asian ones, I have Jewish ones, I have Muslim ones.
Maya Angelou
#97. I am a child of God. I always carry that with me.
Maya Angelou
#98. we were right-handed into a dully furnished living room. L.D.
Maya Angelou
#99. My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.
Maya Angelou
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