Quotes By Maya Angelou

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.

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

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."

Effective action is always unjust.

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.

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

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

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 fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

Life loves the liver of it.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

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.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

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

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

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Nothing will work unless you do.

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

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

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

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.