Maya Angelou Love Quotes & Sayings

If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. — Maya Angelou

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

It's true. I can do anything and do it well because God loves me. It still humbles me. — Maya Angelou

During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love. — Maya Angelou

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

We are loved by Love itself. There is nothing good that we can't do. — Maya Angelou

This is what I am learning, at 82 years old: the main thing is to be in love with the search for truth. — Maya Angelou

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age. — Maya Angelou

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

I couldn't tell fact from fiction,
Or if the dream was true
My only sure prediction
In this world was you.
I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost. — Maya Angelou

Love. And again, see I don't mean, I think love is that condition in the human spirit so profund, that it allows us to forgive, and it may be the energy which keeps the stars in the firmament, I'm not sure. It may be the energy which keeps the blood running smoothly through our veins. I'm not sure, but it's something beyond the explanation. It can be used for anything you can explain. Any good thing you can explain. — 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

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous. — Maya Angelou

We love and lose in China,
we weep on England's moors,
and laugh and moan in Guinea,
and thrive on Spanish shores.
We seek success in Finland,
are born and die in Maine.
In minor ways we differ,
in major we're the same. — Maya Angelou

The love of the family, the love of one person, can heal. It heals the scars left by society. A massive, powerful society. — 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

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

Love heals. Heals and liberates. — 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

I love the song 'I Hope You Dance' by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it. — Maya Angelou

My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom. — Maya Angelou

Soft you day, be velvet soft,
My true love approaches,
Look you bright, you dusty sun,
Array your golden coaches.
Soft you wind, be soft as silk
My true love is speaking.
Hold you birds, your silver throats,
His golden voice I'm seeking.
Come you death, in haste, do come
My shroud of black be weaving,
Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet,
My true love is leaving. — Maya Angelou

This book has been written to examine some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths. — 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

Would you deny your son or your daughter the ecstasy of finding someone to love? — Maya Angelou

Let choice whisper in your ear and love murmur in your heart. Be ready. Here comes life. — Maya Angelou

To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist. — Maya Angelou

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

I love "Phenomenal Woman." The experiences she had of being African American in the U.S. - that itself is a task. I appreciate the hardships Maya Angelou went through for our generation. I'm super influenced by the black people that paved the way for us. — Serena Williams

I missed you but I knew you were in the best place for you. I would have been a terrible mother. I had no patience. Maya, when you were about two years old, you asked me for something. I was busy talking, so you hit my hand, and I slapped you off the porch without thinking. It didn't mean I didn't love you; it just meant I wasn't ready to be a mother. I'm explaining to you, not apologizing. We would have all been sorry had I kept you. — Maya Angelou

Encouragement to all women is - let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let's see if we can't prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness. — Maya Angelou

I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone.
People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. — Maya Angelou

If a human being dreams a great dream, dares to love somebody; if a human being dares to be Martin King, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or Malcolm X; if a human being dares to be bigger than the condition into which she or he was born-it means so can you. And so you can try to stretch, stretch, stretch yourself so you can internalize, 'Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.' That's one thing I'm learning. — Maya Angelou

It's hard because people think they have something to lose and the truth is they have everything to gain in trying to love somebody. — Maya Angelou

I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming? — Maya Angelou

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

I don't know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being - what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other. — Maya Angelou

A Conceit
Give me your hand
Make room for me
to lead and follow
you
beyond this rage of poetry.
Let others have
the privacy of
touching words
and love of loss
of love.
For me
Give me your hand. — Maya Angelou

I would ask every man and every woman who's had the blessing of having children, 'Would you deny your son or your daughter the ecstasy of finding someone to love?' To love someone takes a lot of courage. So how much more is one challenged when the love is of the same sex and the laws say, 'I forbid you from loving this person'? — Maya Angelou

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

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

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

She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere. — Maya Angelou

If men are God's gift to women, then God must really love gag gifts. — 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

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope. — Maya Angelou

Everybody in the world wants the same thing ... to be needed ... a job that he/she can do well ... to love somebody ... Everybody ... There's no mystery. — Maya Angelou

I believe that people want the scent of love, more than anything else. And I don't mean sentimentality, I don't mean mush. I mean that idea, that human beings are more alike than we are different. And that means that I can love you. I don't mean support you in bad things you do, that I can understand because you're a human being. — Maya Angelou

I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth. — Maya Angelou

Life loves the person who dares to live it. — Maya Angelou

Love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
A Brave and Startling Truth. — Maya Angelou

Human beings are more alike than unalike. Whether in Paris, Texas, or Paris, France, we all want to have good jobs where we are needed and respected and paid just a little more than we deserve. We want healthy children, safe streets, to be loved and have the unmitigated gall to accept love. If we are religious, we want a place to perpetuate God. If not, we want a good lecture every once in a while. And everyone wants someplace to party on Saturday nights. — Maya Angelou

Rev. King continued, chanting, singing his prophetic litany. We were one people, indivisible in the sight of God, responsible to each other and for each other.
We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive, must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into Life.
His head was thrown back and his words rolled out with the rumbling of thunder. We had to pray without ceasing and work without tiring. We had to know evil will not forever stay on the throne. That right, dashed to the ground, will rise, rise again and again. — Maya Angelou

When you wish someone joy, you wish them peace, love, prosperity, happiness ... all the good things. — Maya Angelou

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

Some kind of love, Some Say
Is it true the ribs can tell the kick
Of a beast from a lover's fist?
The bruised bones record it well
The sudden shock, the hard impact
Then swollen lids
Sorry eyes spoke not of lost romance
But of hurt
Hate is often confused
Its limits are in zones beyond itself
And sadists will not learn that
Love, by nature, extracts a pain
Unequalled on the rack — Maya Angelou

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

A mother's love liberates. — Maya Angelou

Love is many things. It is varied. One thing love is not, is unsure. — Maya Angelou

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time. — Maya Angelou

The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed. — Maya Angelou

Nothing hurts more than realizing they meant everything to you, but you meant nothing to them. — Maya Angelou

Remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned ... you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make adaptations, in love, in relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind. — Maya Angelou

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. I — Maya Angelou

Love liberates; it doesn't bind. — Maya Angelou

In a Time
In a time of secret wooing
Today prepares tomorrow's ruin
Left knows not what right is doing
My heart is torn asunder.
In a time of furtive sighs
Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes
Half-truths told and entire lies
My conscience echoes thunder
In a time when kingdoms come
Joy is brief as summer's fun
Happiness, its race has run
Then pain stalks in to plunder. — Maya Angelou

Love builds up the broken wall and straightens the crooked path.
Love keeps the stars in the firmament and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides.
Each of us is created of it and I suspect each of us was created for it — Maya Angelou

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

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

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

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.-Martin Luther King Jr. — Maya Angelou

Laugh and dare to try to love somebody, starting with yourself. You must love yourself first, of course, and you must protect yourself so that nobody overrides you, overrules you, or steps on you. Just say, 'Just a minute. I'm worth everything, dear.' — Maya Angelou

We need Joy as we need air. We need Love as we need water. We need each other as we need the earth we share. — Maya Angelou

Love liberates. It doesn't just hold, that's ego. Love liberates. — Maya Angelou

Miss Kirwin was that rare educator who was in love with information. I will always believe that her love of teaching came not so much from her liking for students but from her desire to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so that they could be shared again. — Maya Angelou

Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you. — Maya Angelou

If you happen to fall in love with someone in another race, it's more difficult, because you have to translate yourself. — Maya Angelou

Open your eyes to the beauty around you, open your mind to the wonders of life, open your heart to those who love you, and always be true to yourself. — Maya Angelou

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

I said, "What do I think? That's what I'm asking you? What is there to think?" "Looks like he wants you to be his valentine." "Louise, I can read. But what does it mean?" "Oh, you know. His valentine. His love." There was that hateful word again. That treacherous word that yawned up at you like a volcano. "Well, I won't. Most decidedly I won't. Not ever again." "Have you been his valentine before? What do you mean never again?" I couldn't lie to my friend and I wasn't about to freshen old ghosts. "Well, don't answer him then, and that's the end of it." I was a little relieved that she thought it could be gotten rid of so quickly. I tore the note in half and gave her a part. Walking down the hill we minced the paper in a thousand shreds and gave it to the wind. — Maya Angelou

I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African-American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn't have to translate. — Maya Angelou

Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins. — Maya Angelou

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love. — Maya Angelou

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

I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona - no lime. If the phone rings, I won't answer until I'm done. — 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

I was always yours to have.
You were always mine.
We have loved each other in and out of time. — 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

Love recognizes no barriers. — 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

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin ... but who we are internally ... perhaps even spiritually. There's something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know. — Maya Angelou

To those who have given up on love: I say, Trust life a little bit. — Maya Angelou

Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off you. — Maya Angelou

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time. — Maya Angelou

He watched her every move and when she left the room, his eyes allowed her reluctantly to go. — 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

Laugh as often as possible. You must. Because the world will offer you every reason to weep. So as often as possible, you laugh. That, I think, is part of the Great Love. — 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

I would say you might encounter many defeats but you must never be defeated, ever. In fact, it might even be necessary to confront defeat. It might be necessary, to get over it, all the way through it, and go on. I would teach her to laugh a lot. Laugh a lot at the - and the silliest things and be very, very serious. I'd teach her to love life, I can bet you that. — Maya Angelou

I am truly grateful: for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love - for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence ... And I'm grateful to know it exists in me, and I'm able to share it with so many people. — Maya Angelou