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.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

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.

I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that’s me.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

The more you know, the less you need.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts … good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.