Quotes By Maya Angelou

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

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.

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

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

Life loves the liver of it.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

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.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.

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

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

Nothing will work unless you do.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

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

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Effective action is always unjust.

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.

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.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.