Maya Angelou Quotes

...We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it's just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

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

If you are going down a road and don't like what's in front of you, and look behind you and don't like what you see, get off the road. Create a new path!

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

The most important thing is to DARE.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

Let us live so we do not regret years of inertia and ignorance, so when we die we can say all of our energy was dedicated to the noble liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own.

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.'

A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

What we really have to do is take a day and sit down and think. The world is not going to end or fall apart. Jobs won't be lost. Kids will not run crazy in one day. Lovers won't stop speaking to you. Husbands and wives are not going to disappear. Just take that one day and think. Don't read. Don't write. No television, no radio, no distractions. Sit down and think. . . . Go sit in a church, or in the park, or take a long walk and think. Call it a healing day.

I think we ought to give ourselves more time. We should be more patient with ourselves and with each other.

Let the brain go to work, let it meet the heart and you will be able to forgive.

We need to not be in denial about what we've done, what we've come through. It will help us if we all do that.

I'm a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I'm even afraid of it - it's a learned affectation and it's just stuck on me like decals.

This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.

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.

Whining is just unbecoming.

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'?

If you have a song to sing, who are you not to open your mouth and sing to the world?

I am not competing with anyone other than myself. I want to be excellent at whatever I do.

I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. So at this wonderful, young age of 65, I don't know yet what the Lord has for me to do. I try to live up to the energy and to the calling, but I wouldn't dare say I have even scratched the surface yet.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves.

My mother raised me, and then freed me.

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.

I know, that since life is our most precious gift, and as far as we can be absolutely certain, it's given to us to live but once, let us so live we will not regret years of useless virtue, and inertia, and timidity, and ignorance, and in our last moments we can say: 'All my life, all my conscious energies, have been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world, the liberation of the human mind and spirit - beginning with my own'.

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

I'm a feminist. I've been a female for a long time now. It'd be stupid not to be on my own side.

You may not remember what a person said to you, you may not remember what a person did to you, but you will never forget how a person made you feel!

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

It's amazing. I can do anything. And do it well. Any good thing, I can do it. That's why I am who I am, yes, because God loves me and I'm amazed at it. I'm grateful for it.

Each of us has the power and responsibility to become a rainbow in the clouds.

All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.

We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.

Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.

It is important that we learn humility, which says there was someone else before me who paid for me. My responsibility is to prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who is yet to come.

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

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.

No one comes from the earth like grass. We come like trees. We all have roots.

Today, the first & last of every Tree/ Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.

The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough.

Courage - you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn't want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself.

Blacks concede that hurrawing, jibing, jiving, signifying, disrespecting, cursing, even outright insults might be acceptable under particular conditions, but aspersions cast against one's family call for immediate attack.