Maya Angelou

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.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

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.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Practice makes perfect, and nobody’s perfect, so why practice?

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

Leave the rest to the gods.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

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

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.