Maya Angelou Inspirational Quotes & Sayings

I know why the caged bird sings. — Maya Angelou

I sustain myself with the love of family. — Maya Angelou

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

I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that's in it.
Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute. — Maya Angelou

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

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

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable. — Maya Angelou

I know for sure that love saves me. And that it is here to save us all. I know it's a sense, it's more close to us than air, more loud to us than hearing. I know it. I know that we can sit in it. Yes, love honey, and you know by that, I don't mean mush, or any, I don't mean romance, or sentimentality. I mean something is so, it can raise the dead. It can make a mountain move. I know it. I haven't done it, but i know it. As surely as I'm sitting here. — Maya Angelou

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it! — Maya Angelou

I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating. — Maya Angelou

I am a child of God. I always carry that with me. — Maya Angelou

My mother's gifts of courage to me were both large and small. The latter are woven so subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin. — Maya Angelou

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. — Maya Angelou

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

I looked up the way I was going and back the way I come and since I wasn't satisfied I stepped off and [found] me a new path. — Maya Angelou

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. — Maya Angelou

Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman. — Maya Angelou

I am the dream and the hope of the slave. — Maya Angelou

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

The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness. — Maya Angelou

No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. — Maya Angelou

Seek the fashion which truly fits and befits you. You will always be in fashion if you are true to yourself, and only if you are true to yourself. — Maya Angelou

Segregation shaped me; education liberated me. — Maya Angelou

We will sometimes have defeats in life but you can have defeats without being defeated, you could fail without being a failure. When you see failure and defeats as merely part of the process to get to when. — Maya Angelou

One morning as I was leaving, the director said I didn't have to leave the set anymore. What happened? Why did they change their ways of treating me? I came to the realization that it was because I had a mother. My mother spoke highly of me, and to me. But more important, whether they met her or simply heard about her, she was there with me. She had my back, supported me. This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known. In Stockholm, my mother shed her protective love down around me and without knowing why people sensed that I had value. — Maya Angelou

You can never be great at anything unless you love it. — Maya Angelou

I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world's variety and uniqueness. — Maya Angelou

Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse. — 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

Nothing will work unless you do. — Maya Angelou

The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise. — Maya Angelou

A Woman in harmony with her spirit
is like a river flowing.
She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination
prepared to be herself
and only herself — Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou entered our lives at Virago in 1984, when we first published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. "Entered our lives" is too tame. She danced, sang, and laughed her way straight into our hearts. She brought us a best-seller, but more than that, she brought us a reminder that the human need for dignity and recognition is a gift easily given to one another, but also frighteningly easy to withhold. — Lennie Goodings

Very few people grow up — Maya Angelou

Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution. — Maya Angelou

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come. — Maya Angelou

Go," she whispered. "Go. Show them you spell your name W-O-M-A-N. — Maya Angelou

That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, 'Cant do is like Dont Care.' Neither of them have a home. — Maya Angelou

You can call for the cook, call for the baker, you may as well call for the undertaker. — Maya Angelou

People will not remember what you say. People will not remember what you do. They will always remember how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou... — Mollie Bickle Cardwell

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.
(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.") — Maya Angelou

She liberated me from a society that would have had me think of myself as the lower of the low. She liberated me to life. And from that time to this time, I have taken life by the lapels and I have said, "I'm with you, kid. — Maya Angelou

I did then what I knew best, when I knew better, I did better. Maya Angelo — Maya Angelou

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

What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain. — Maya Angelou

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. — Maya Angelou

Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift. — Maya Angelou

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

Courage allows the successful woman to fail - and to learn powerful lessons from the failure - so that in the end, she didn't fail at all. — Maya Angelou

Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity. — Maya Angelou

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well. — Maya Angelou

I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people. — Maya Angelou

I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt. — Maya Angelou