Maya Angelou

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.

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.

When you know better you do better.

Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Right is right even if everyone is against it and wrong is wrong even if everyone is for it.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

For we put the power in the people.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

If you wish me to weep, you must first show grief yourself.