Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.
– Maya Angelou
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
– Maya Angelou
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
– Maya Angelou
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.
– Maya Angelou
Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
– Maya Angelou
All great achievements require time.
– Maya Angelou
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
– 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
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
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
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
– Maya Angelou
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
– Maya Angelou
Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.
– Maya Angelou
Effective action is always unjust.
– 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
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
– Maya Angelou
I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people.
– Maya Angelou
I answer the heroic question Death, where is they sting? with It is here in my heart and mind and memories.
– Maya Angelou
I believe that every person is born with talent.
– Maya Angelou
I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
– Maya Angelou
I find it interresting 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 commensurate speed.
– Maya Angelou
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
– Maya Angelou
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
– Maya Angelou
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
– Maya Angelou
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
– Maya Angelou
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
– Maya Angelou
If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
– 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
Life loves the liver of it.
– Maya Angelou
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ''I'm with you kid. Let's go.''
– Maya Angelou
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
– Maya Angelou
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
– 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
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 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
Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.
– Maya Angelou
Nothing will work unless you do.
– Maya Angelou
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 unshaken need for an unshakable God.
– 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
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
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
– Maya Angelou
Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
– 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
Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
– Maya Angelou
Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.
– 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
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
– 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
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
– Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
– Maya Angelou
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
– Maya Angelou
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
– Maya Angelou
We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.
– 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
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
– 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
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
– Maya Angelou
A woman who is convinced that she deserves to accept only the best challenges herself to give the best. Then she is living phenomenally.
– Maya Angelou
I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world's variety and uniqueness.
– Maya Angelou
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
– Maya Angelou
I know why the caged bird sings.
– 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
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
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
– Maya Angelou
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
– 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
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
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
– Maya Angelou
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
