Maya Angelou

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.

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

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.

Bondage is… subjection to external influences and internal negative thoughts and attitudes.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The connection between us runs so strong and deep. It’s like a steel cable stretching across the ocean bed, so many fathoms below, that even the most skilled and courageous of deep sea divers cannot reach it to cut it. It remains strong, silent, invisible, invincible.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

All promise outruns performance.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.