Maya Angelou

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to asses the road which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the feature road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting-inviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well.

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

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I’m with you kid. Let’s go.”

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

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

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success – or are they holding you back?

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.