Maya Angelou

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.