Maya Angelou

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

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.

Be present in all things and thankful for all things.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

All problems are finally scientific problems.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me.

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.