Maya Angelou Quotes & Sayings

I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn't just hold-that's ego. Love liberates. It doesn't bind. Love says, 'I love you. I love you if you're in China. I love you if you're across town. I love you if you're in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I'd like to have your arms around me. I'd like to hear your voice in my ear. But that's not possible now, so I love you. Go.' — Maya Angelou

Even if they were society's pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus, the Son of God. — Maya Angelou

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

Having courage does not mean we are unafraid. — Maya Angelou

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me. — Maya Angelou

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

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don't just want to possess it, it will find you. — 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

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

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

Drinks on the closed-in porch. The exactness of her — Maya Angelou

You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated. — Maya Angelou

That day, I learned that I could be a giver simply by bringing a smile to another person. The ensuing years have taught me that a kind word or a vote of support can be a charitable gift. I can move over and make another place for another to sit. I can turn my music up if it pleases, or down if it is annoying. I may never be known as a philanthropist, but I certainly want to be known as charitable. — Maya Angelou

I am not competing with anyone other than myself. I want to be excellent at whatever I do. — Maya Angelou

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity. — Maya Angelou

You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off of you. — Maya Angelou

Strong women- precious jewels all- their humanness is evident in their accessibility. We are able to enter into the spirit of these women and rejoice in their warmth and courage. — Maya Angelou

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not. — Maya Angelou

Of course I could drive. Idiots and lunatics drove cars. Why not the brilliant Marguerite Johnson? — Maya Angelou

First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love. — Maya Angelou

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom. — Maya Angelou

Black women have not historically stood in the pulpit, but that doesn't undermine the fact that they built the churches and maintain the pulpits. — Maya Angelou

I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life ... her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing. — Maya Angelou

Through the centuries, we faced down death by daring to hope. — Maya Angelou

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

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it. — Maya Angelou

Exchange love for hate ... Thereby, making the present comfortable and the future promising. — Maya Angelou

Remember, people will judge you by your actions not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold but so does a hard-boiled egg. — Maya Angelou

Take the blinders from your vision take the padding from your ears and confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears. — Maya Angelou

I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said it later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of the whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock.
He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.
I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since. — Maya Angelou

You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. — Maya Angelou

To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents — Maya Angelou

In spite of everything that was done to me and my race, in spite of the adversity and the bitter moments, again we rise. — Maya Angelou

You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it. — Maya Angelou

She was born poor and powerless in a land where power is money and money is adored.
Born black in a land where might is white and white is adored.
Born female in a land where decisions are masculine and masculinity controls. — Maya Angelou

Dignity doesn't just mean always being stiff and composed. It means a belief in oneself, that one is worthy of the best. Dignity means that what I have to say is important, and I will say it when it's important for me to say it. Dignity really means that I deserve the best treatment I can receive. And that I have the responsibility to give the best treatment I can to other people. — Maya Angelou

Will I be less dead because I wrote this poem or you more because you read it long years hence. — Maya Angelou

It's another to the body, and it looks like Louis is going down.' My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trip of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful. — Maya Angelou

We are here to love each other.
That is why you are alive.
That is what life is for. — Maya Angelou

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

The charitable say in effect, 'I seem to have more than I need and you seem to have less than you need. I would like to share my excess with you.' Fine, if my excess is tangible, money or goods, and fine if not, for I learned that to be charitable with gestures and words can bring enormous joy and repair injured feelings. — Maya Angelou

I'm grateful to be an American. I am grateful that we can be angry at the terrorist assault and at the same time be intelligent enough not to hold a grudge against every Arab and every Muslim. — Maya Angelou

Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois' "Litany at Atlanta." But it was Shakespeare who said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. — Maya Angelou

Just do right. Right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul. It brings you the kind of protection that bodyguards can't give you. So try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.
Take up the battle. Take it up.
It's yours. This is your life.
This is your world. — Maya Angelou

My encouragement to you is to go tomorrow to the library. — Maya Angelou

They may have forgotten how badly they treated you, or they may pretend that they have forgotten. But watch: They will come back to you. — Maya Angelou

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

You can only accomplish what I really love. Do not take the money as a goal. Instead, pursue the things you passionate about, and do good to others can not take my eyes off you — Maya Angelou

The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry. — Maya Angelou

We need to develop courage, and we need to develop it in small ways first ... You develop a little courage, so that if you decide, I will not stay in rooms where women are belittled; I will not stay in company where races, no matter who they are, are belittled; I will not take it; I will not sit around and accept dehumanising other human beings: - if you decide to do that in small ways, and you continue to do it - finally you realize you've got so much courage. Imagine it - you've got so much courage that people want to be around you. They get a feeling that they will be protected in your company. — Maya Angelou

Hatred is the ballast of the rock which lies upon our necks and underfoot. — Maya Angelou

Be present in all things and thankful for all things. — Maya Angelou

The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change. — Maya Angelou

Tell the truth and not the facts. — Maya Angelou

Ritie, don't worry 'cause you ain't pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind. — Maya Angelou

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English. — Maya Angelou

Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil. — Maya Angelou

I've tried to be totally present, so that when I'm finished with a piece of work, I'm finished ... The work, once completed, does not need me. The work I'm working on needs my total concentration. The one that's finished doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to itself. — Maya Angelou

Very few people grow up — Maya Angelou

When members of a society wish to secure that society's rich heritage they cherish their arts and respect their artists. The esteem with which we regard the multiple cultures offered in our country enhances our possibilities for healthy survival and continued social development. — Maya Angelou

When old folks laugh,
they consider the promise
of dear painless death, and generously
forgive life for happening
to them. — Maya Angelou

Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God's angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma's rough — Maya Angelou

It's very hard for adults to maintain respect and romance so that a love affair can be sustained over years. — Maya Angelou

Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.' — Maya Angelou

Malcolm stood at the microphone. 'Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else's freedom.' His voice, deep and textured, reached through the crowd, across the street to the tenement windows where listeners leaned half their bodies out into the spring air. 'The black man has been programmed to die. To die either by his own hand, the hand of his brother or at the hand of a blue-eyed devil trained to do one thing: take the black man's life.' The — Maya Angelou

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed. — Maya Angelou

Reality has changed chameleonlike before my eyes so many times that I have learned, or am learning, to trust almost anything except what appears to be so. — Maya Angelou

Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else. — Maya Angelou

Blacks concede that hurrawing, jibing, jiving, signifying, disrespecting, cursing, even outright insults might be acceptable under particular conditions, but aspersions cast against one's family call for immediate attack. — Maya Angelou

People don't always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you make them feel. — Maya Angelou

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

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do. — 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

The idea of overcoming is always fascinating to me, because few of us realize how much energy we have expended just to be here today. — Maya Angelou

Each of us has the power and responsibility to become a rainbow in the clouds. — Maya Angelou

Can I do it? I'd rather not try and fail.
That's stupid talk Maya. Every try will not succeed. But if you're going to live, live at all, your business is trying ... You fail, you get up and try again. — Maya Angelou

Your voice at times a fist
Tight in your throat
Jabs ceaselessly at phantoms
In the room,
Your hand a carved and
Skimming boat
Goes down the Nile
To point out Pharaoh's tomb.
You're Africa to me
At brightest dawn.
The Congo's green and
Copper's brackish hue,
A continent to build
With Black Man's brawn.
I sit at home and see it all
Through you. — Maya Angelou

Achievement brings its own anticlimax. — Maya Angelou

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now. — Maya Angelou

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

A black person grows up in this country - and in many places - knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone. — Maya Angelou

I stood dumbfounded, founded in dumbness. — Maya Angelou

Food served is always more than just food served. That is to say, it is more than just fuel for the body. Depending upon who has prepared the food and who has served it and with what spirit, it can uplift the
and around the world, in every culture, food is used to flirt, to be coy, a raise in the employment or to search for employment. It can bring warring factions together. — Maya Angelou

The honorary duty of a human being is to love. — Maya Angelou

The naturally lonely person does not look for comfort in love, but accepts the variables as due course. — 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

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

Every Day you should reach out and touch someone — Maya Angelou

To those who are given much, much is expected. — Maya Angelou

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

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. — 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 was liked, and what a difference it made. — Maya Angelou

You might encounter defeats but you must never be defeated ... Love a lot. Laugh a lot at the silliest things and be very serious ... love life. — Maya Angelou

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

No sun outlasts its sunset, but will rise again and bring the dawn. — Maya Angelou

Don't trust people who don't laugh — Maya Angelou

The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity. — Maya Angelou

We are more alike than unalike. — Maya Angelou

When people see the laughing face, even if they're jealous of it, their burden is lightened. But do it first for yourself. Laugh and dare to try to love somebody, starting with yourself. — Maya Angelou