Last Updated on 22 June 2024

Quotes from Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

• 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.
• Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!
• 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.
• Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.
• The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
• Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.
• Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
• Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
• Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
• The human heart is so delicate and sensitive that it always needs some tangible encouragement to prevent it from faltering in its labor.
• I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.
• I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.
• If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves.
• If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
• If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love.
• If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.
• In a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.
• In all my work, what I try to say is that as human beings, we are more alike than we are unalike.
• Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.
• Life offers us tickets to places which we have not knowingly asked for.
• The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.
• Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.
• Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold, that’s ego. Love liberates.
• Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.
• My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.
• Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.
• Not everything you do is going to be a masterpiece, but you get art there and you try and sometimes it really happens. The other times you’re just stretching your soul.
• Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.
• One must learn to care for oneself first, so that one can then dare to care for someone else.
• Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.
• There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
• Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.
• We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
• We need much less than we think we need.
• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
• When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.