Maya Angelou – 39 Quotes

39 Quotes by Maya Angelou

Life loves the liver of it.

– Maya Angelou

Nothing will work unless you do.

– Maya Angelou

All great achievements require time.

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

– 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

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands you need to be able to throw something back.

– Maya Angelou

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

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

– 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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– 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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou

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.

– Maya Angelou