Maya Angelou

I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life’.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

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

I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I want to be free; to escape. I use my pen as oars; the paper as my boat. I fill these pages to keep me afloat. I ride the waves of turmoil, so I can paddle away to calmer seas.

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

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.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.