Maya Angelou

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

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.

When you know better you do better.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.

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.

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

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

Those who cross the sea change only the climate, not their character.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

What I mean is you make the world less ugly just by living in it.

Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.