Maya Angelou Quotes - Page 3

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou
To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.
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
Don't let the man bring you down.
Maya Angelou
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 freedom.
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
A friend may be waiting behind a stranger's face.
Maya Angelou
I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?
Maya Angelou
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence—neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish—it is an imponderably valuable gift.
Maya Angelou
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Maya Angelou
There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself about complaining. 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.
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
Segregation shaped me education liberated me.
Maya Angelou
I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.
Maya Angelou
Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.
Maya Angelou
When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.
Maya Angelou
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Maya Angelou
Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
Maya Angelou
I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
Maya Angelou
When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
Maya Angelou
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.
Maya Angelou
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
Maya Angelou
I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn 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
A certain person wondered whya big strong girl like mewouldn't keep a jobwhich paid a normal salary.I took my time to lead herand to read her every page.Even minimal peoplecan't survive on minimal wage.A certain person wondered whyI wait all week for you.I didn't have the wordsto describe just what you do.I said you had the motionof the ocean in your walk,and when you solve my riddlesyou don't even have to talk.
Maya Angelou
You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may tread me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries.Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard'Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.
Maya Angelou
Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.
Maya Angelou
It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I’m a woman Phenomenally.
Maya Angelou
I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.
Maya Angelou
It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.
Maya Angelou
I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.
Maya Angelou
To those who are given much, much is expected.
Maya Angelou
No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
Maya Angelou
Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it.
Maya Angelou
I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss
Maya Angelou
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. 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 a commensurate speed.
Maya Angelou
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
Maya Angelou
I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world's variety and uniqueness.
Maya Angelou
I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.
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
Nothing will work unless you do.
Maya Angelou
All great achievements require time.
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
I sustain myself with the love of family.
Maya Angelou
The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
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
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
Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!
Maya Angelou
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
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
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
This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.
Maya Angelou
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou