Maya Angelou

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

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.

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

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.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who think diffenrently…

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.