Maya Angelou

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

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

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

Tear thyself from delay.

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

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

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.