Maya Angelou

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

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.

I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that’s me.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Justice though moving with tardy pace, has seldom failed to overtake the wicked in their flight.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

The one who prosperity takes too much delight in will be the most shocked by reverses.