Maya Angelou

Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life’.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

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.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

If there be three distinct and separate Persons, then three distinct and separate Substances. . . . And since the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God . . . then unless the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Nothings, they must be three distinct Substances, and consequently three distinct Gods.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

Think with your whole body.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa….Leonardo had eye trouble….Art couldn’t explain it….But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.