Maya Angelou

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.

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

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can’t blame them for that, can you?

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

Already know you that which you need.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Whatever you have spend less.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.