Maya Angelou

Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

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.

I always forgive others. The anger; sadness; frustration; pain, whatever feelings I felt, no matter the hurt; the tears, I always found understanding and reason to forgive them; to not hold onto it; to not resent them. But there is one, who I never seem to be able to give absolution, and that’s myself.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

Earth laughs in flowers.