Maya Angelou Quotations | Page 4

You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.

I am convinced that courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue consistently. You can be kind for a while; you can be generous for a while; you can be just for a while, or merciful for a while, even loving for a while. But it is only with courage that you can be persistently and insistently kind and generous and fair.

The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief’s bugle, but where to blow it.

You don't need another person, place or thing to make you whole. God already did that. Your job is to know it.

I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.

I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.

I don't trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

When you learn, teach, when you get, give.

Stand up straight and realize who you are, that you tower over your circumstances. You are a child of God. Stand up straight.

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.

I would like to be known as an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who teaches by being.

When I try to describe myself to God I say, “Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?” And I almost always get God's attention.

I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.

I'm grateful to be an American. I am grateful that we can be angry at the terrorist assault and at the same time be intelligent enough not to hold a grudge against every Arab and every Muslim.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

Each of us, famous or infamous, is a role model for somebody, and if we aren't, we should behave as though we are -- cheerful, kind, loving, courteous. Because you can be sure someone is watching and taking deliberate and diligent notes.

If God put the rainbows right in the clouds themselves, each one of us in the direst and dullest and most dreaded and dreary moments can see a possibility of hope ... Each one of us has the chance to be a rainbow in somebody's cloud.

Just do right. Right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul. It brings you the kind of protection that bodyguards can’t give you. So try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity. Take up the battle. Take it up. It’s yours. This is your life. This is your world.

We need much less than we think we need.

To know and not to do is in fact not to know. We need to be active instruments against evil. We need to do.

I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one. I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.

You can see in others what they don't see in themselves and what the world doesn't see in them,

remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned...you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make adaptations, in love, in relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind.

Every day I awaken I am grateful. My intent is to be totally present in that day. And laugh as much as possible.

If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you will look forward, do so prayerfully. But the wisest course would be to be present in the present gratefully.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.

Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.

In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric.

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.

Ain't nothin' to it, but to do it.

We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.

Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.

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

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

I encourage courtesy. To accept nothing less than courtesy, and to give nothing less than courtesy. If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity.

Love life. Engage in it. Give it all you've got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.

Having courage does not mean that we are unafraid. Having courage and showing courage mean we face our fears. We are able to say, 'I have fallen, but I will get up.'

Now, after years of observation and enough courage to admit what I have observed, I try to plant peace if I do not want discord; to plant loyalty and honesty if I want to avoid betrayal and lies.

We all have that possibility, that potential and that promise of seeing beyond the seeming.

Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Life is a gift, and i try to respond with grace and courtesy.

A friend may be waiting behind a stranger's face.

Continue. Be loving and be strong. Be fierce and be kind. And don't give in and don't give up.'

Don't bring negative to my door.

Forgive yourself - no one else will.

You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.

I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I'm praying, but also something wonderful happens to me. I'm grateful that I'm heard.

I'm a feminist. I've been a female for a long time now. It'd be stupid not to be on my own side.

People don't always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you make them feel.

All great achievements require time.

It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don't think it will come back.

Remember, people will judge you by your actions not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold but so does a hard-boiled egg.

If you have done the best you can do and if you have gotten all you could extract from something, you have given all you had to give, then the time has come when you can do no more than say thank you and move on.

Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

Take a day to heal from the lies you've told yourself and the ones that have been told to you.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise. Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear, I rise.

I think when we don't know what to do it's wise to do nothing. Sit down quietly; quiet our hearts and minds and breathe deeply.

A Woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing. She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself

I'm not sure if resilience is ever achieved alone. Experience allows us to learn from example. But if we have someone who loves us-I don't mean who indulges us, but who loves us enough to be on our side-then it's easier to grow resilience, to grow belief in self, to grow self-esteem. And it's self-esteem that allows a person to stand up.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

To those who have given up on love: I say, "Trust life a little bit.

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

When you do nothing you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.

I love living. I love that I'm alive to love my age. There are many people who went to bed just as I did yesterday evening and didn't wake this morning. I love and feel very blessed that I did. I love, too, that I know a little more today than I did yesterday, or I simply know it more profoundly.

Seek patience and passion in equal amounts. Patience alone will not build the temple. Passion alone will destroy its walls.

If you are going down a road and don't like what's in front of you, and look behind you and don't like what you see, get off the road. Create a new path!

I try to see every day as a celebration.

Love builds up the broken wall and straightens the crooked path. Love keeps the stars in the firmament and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides. Each of us is created of it and I suspect each of us was created for it

I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.

We are not our brother’s keeper we are our brother and we are our sister. We must look past complexion and see community.

Everybody is worth everything.

In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.

Determine to live life with flair and laughter.

Stormy or sunny days, glorious or lonely nights, I maintain an attitude of gratitude.

You have to have courage to love somebody. Because you risk everything. Everything.

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.

You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'

Love liberates. Love - not sentimentality, not mush - but true love gives you enough courage that you can say to somebody, "Don't do that, baby." And the person will know you're not preaching but teaching.

I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that's in it. Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies. I say, It's in the reach of my arms The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.

You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.

Poetry is music written for the human voice.

No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Whining is not only graceless, but it can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.

I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.

Money and power can liberate only if they are used to do so. They can imprison and inhibit more finally than barred windows and iron chains.

Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.