Maya Angelou Quotes

Whining is not only graceless, but it can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.

Life sometimes gives you a second chance.

I keep on dying, Because I love to live

I like good food. People want a certain taste, but when they're offered something else, they'll overeat. If they really are looking for chicken and someone gives them pork chops, they'll say, "I will have another." And that's because their satisfaction is not reached. So I thought I would make great food, but eat less of it. I tried it and I've taken off over 40 pounds.

Continue to plant a kiss of concern on the cheek of the sick and the aged and infirm and count that actions as natural and to be expected.

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential.

I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.

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.'

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

We are missing Michael. But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

A joyful spirit is evidence of a grateful heart.

There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine. Clean. So that nobody has a right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody. No mother, father, no wife, no husband, no­­­-nobody. You have to have a place where you say: 'Stop it. Back up. Don't you know I'm a child of God?

The problem I have with haters is that they see my glory, but they don't know my story.

God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us - in the dreariest and most dreaded moments - can see a possibility of hope.

We agreed that great men and women should be forced to live as long as possible. The reverence they enjoyed was a life sentence, which they could neither revoke nor modify.

Have a purpose to your life: Purpose does not mean having a job...You can have a job and still be unfulfilled.

I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place.

When we know better, we do better.

I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that's me.

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.

We have it in us to be splendid.

Faith is the evidence of the unseen.

I've had rainbows in my clouds.

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

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.

There is an amazing something in the American psyche which speaks about courage, and it says, 'Yes I can,' ... Yes, we will overcome it all because we have the spirit to do so.

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

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

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.

You don't have to tell everything you know, but let what you do say be the truth as you understand it.

Beneath the skin, beyond the differing features and into the true heart of being, fundamentally, we are more alike, my friend, than we are unalike.

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.

Nothing will work unless you do.

No one has ever become poor from giving.

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.

I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.

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

I live in an atmosphere of music.

They who have health have hope; and they who have hope, have everything.

Prepare yourself so that you can be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud.

Modesty is a learned affectation. It's no good. Humility is great, because humility says, 'There was someone before me. I'm following in somebody's footsteps.'

Whenever something went wrong when I was young - if I had a pimple or if my hair broke - my mom would say, 'Sister mine, I'm going to make you some soup.' And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.

Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.

Among other things, I'm thinking "I'm a child of God." That's amazing. And "I'm not only a child of God, but God loves me." The hardest part for me is to realize that while God loves me, and I am a child of God, I have to see the bigot and the brute and the rapist, and whether he or she knows it or not, I have to know that that person is a child of God. That is part of the responsibility - and it's hard.

We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.

People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.

[Librarians] study their field with as much determination and as much delight as open-heart surgeons.

I'm interested in women's health because I'm a woman. I'd be a darn fool not to be on my own side.