American writer, Maya Angelou survived a tough childhood and early adulthood to become a singer, actress, activist, and writer. In 1993, she came to much wider attention when she recited a poem of her own composition at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton.
Selected Maya Angelou Quotations
• How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
• It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.
• A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
• The needs of society determine its ethics.
• 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.
• I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.
• I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
• The honorary duty of a human being is to love.
• Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong.
• History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
• Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.
• There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
• The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
• Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean.
• Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
• If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
• Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
• 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.
• Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.
