Maya Angelou

Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Be present in all things and thankful for all things.

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.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life…all of our life.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.