Maya Angelou Quotes

259 Sourced Quotes

You're Africa to me
At brightest dawn.
The Congo's green and
Copper's brackish hue,
A continent to build
With Black Man's brawn.
I sit at home and see it all
Through you.

Maya Angelou
Money and power can liberate only if they are used to do so. They can imprison and inhibit more finally than barred windows and iron chains.

Maya Angelou
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.

Maya Angelou
Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.

Maya Angelou
You may not get what you paid for, but you will pay for what you get.

Maya Angelou
We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter the defeat so that we can know who we are. So that we can see, "Oh, that happened, and I rose. I did get knocked down flat in front of the whole world, and I rose. I didn't run away; I rose right where I'd been knocked down." That's how you get to know yourself.

Maya Angelou
Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at all.
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn't frighten me at all.

Maya Angelou
I lay down in my grave
and watch my children
grow
Proud blooms
above the weeds of death.

Maya Angelou
I'm trying to be a Christian and the Bible helps me to remind myself what I'm about.

Maya Angelou
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a woman called by a devaluing name will only be weakened by the misnomer.

Maya Angelou
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Maya Angelou
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Maya Angelou
All people use food for more reasons than pure nutrition.

Maya Angelou
Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.

Maya Angelou
In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.

Maya Angelou
They've laughed to shield their crying
then shuffled though the dreams
and stepped 'n fetched a country
to write the blues with screams.

Maya Angelou
Love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
A Brave and Startling Truth.

Maya Angelou
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.

Maya Angelou
If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.

Maya Angelou
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

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
People are too busy putting things under microscopes. Creativity is more than the sum of its parts.

Maya Angelou
The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful.

Maya Angelou
Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

Maya Angelou
The human heart is so delicate and sensitive that it always needs some tangible encouragement to prevent it from faltering in its labour.

Maya Angelou
Let me tell so much truth. I want to tell the truth in my work. The truth will lead me to all.

Maya Angelou
Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom when Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote. We were enlarged by tears of pride as we saw Nelson Mandela's former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration.

Maya Angelou
We are not our brother's keeper we are our brother and we are our sister. We must look past complexion and see community.

Maya Angelou
In a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, love exists. I'm grateful to know that it exists.

Maya Angelou
All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Maya Angelou