Maya Angelou Quotes

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• 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.
• If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
• My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
• Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.
• 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.Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
• Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
• Nothing will work unless you do.
• 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.'
• We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
• You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.
• A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.
• Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
• I'm convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they're stones that don't matter. As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to do some good.
• I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.
• Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.
• One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
• It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
• I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.
• Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
• Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
• Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
• It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

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