Maya Angelou

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

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

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

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn’t deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.

All that appears is devoid of independent existence, just like a magical apparition or a dream.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and attention in complaints which, if properly applied, might remove the cause.