Maya Angelou

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

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.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

It is not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.