Maya Angelou Quotes

259 Sourced Quotes

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

Maya Angelou
To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses.

Maya Angelou
Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Maya Angelou
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.

Maya Angelou
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.

Maya Angelou
I've tried to be totally present, so that when I'm finished with a piece of work, I'm finished.... The work, once completed, does not need me. The work I'm working on needs my total concentration. The one that's finished doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to itself.

Maya Angelou
Mostly, what I have learned so far about aging, despite the creakiness of one's bones and cragginess of one's once-silken skin, is this: Do it. By all means, do it.

Maya Angelou
I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

Maya Angelou
I made the decision to quit show business. Give up the skintight dresses and manicured smiles. The false concern over sentimental lyrics. I would never again work to make people smile inanely and would take on the responsibility of making them think.

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
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
There is a place in you that you must keep inviolate, a place that you must keep clean. A place where you say to any intruder, "Back up, don't you know I'm a child of God.

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
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud. Peace.

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

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

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

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
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
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
Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don't understand but something I'm able to harness and use.

Maya Angelou
Love liberates. It doesn't just hold, that's ego. Love liberates.

Maya Angelou
Being free is being able to accept people for what they are, and not try to understand all they are or be what they are.

Maya Angelou
Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity.

Maya Angelou
Do not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness.

Maya Angelou