Maya Angelou Quotes

259 Sourced Quotes

Glory falls around us
as we sob
a dirge of
desolation on the Cross
and hatred is the ballast of
the rock

Maya Angelou
Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

Maya Angelou
Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.

Maya Angelou
Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

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
There are some nights when sleep plays coy, aloof and disdainful. And all the wiles that I employ to win its service to my side are useless as wounded pride, and much more painful.

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
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
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 unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

Maya Angelou
I'm very blessed that I have a healthy temper. I can become quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. Bitterness is a corrosive, terrible acid. It just eats you and makes you sick.

Maya Angelou
We love and lose in China, we weep on England's moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we're the same.

Maya Angelou
The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs—ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood.

Maya Angelou
For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Maya Angelou
I agreed a long time ago, I would not live at any cost. If I am moved or forced away from what I think is the right thing, I will not do it.

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

Maya Angelou
Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.

Maya Angelou
I find it interesting 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
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 their color; equal in importance no matter their texture.

Maya Angelou
If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.

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
Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.

Maya Angelou
Soft you day, be velvet soft, My true love approaches, Look you bright, you dusty sun, Array your golden coaches. Soft you wind, be soft as silk My true love is speaking. Hold you birds, your silver throats, His golden voice I'm seeking. Come you death, in haste, do come My shroud of black be weaving, Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet, My true love is leaving.

Maya Angelou
If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves.

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