Maya Angelou

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

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 we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

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.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The only way to know is to live, learn, and grow.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.

Cultivate kindness today and always.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.