We’ve collected the best Maya Angelou Quotes. Use them as an inspiration.
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I’m a serious aficionada of country music – Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I’ve even written some songs. They haven‘t done anything of mine yet. But it’s only a matter of time.
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Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow. Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone.
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Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‘leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.
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In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.
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I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.
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I’m just like you – I want to be a good human being. I’m doing my best, and I’m working at it. And I’m trying to be a Christian. I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I always think, ‘Already? You’ve already got it?’ I’m working at it. And at my age, I’ll still be working at it at 96.
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At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
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During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.
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When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
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I write some country music. There’s a song called ‘I Hope You Dance.’ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.
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Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.
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The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.
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I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
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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.
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I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion‘s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.
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Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‘I,’ meaning ‘we.’
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I like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them.
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I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.
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Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.
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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.
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Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.
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The only thing is, people have to develop courage. It is most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtues consistently.
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We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.
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If you’re a human being, you can attempt to do what other human beings have done. We don’t understand talent any more than we understand electricity.
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I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.
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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.
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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.
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Life loves the liver of it.
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I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.
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I created myself. I have taught myself so much.
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Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
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I know that I’ve been guided by God. I am obedient.
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All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open.
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I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.
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I was very blessed to have family and friends, but particularly family, who told me I was not only all right, I was just right, so I believe that my brain is a good one, and it’s lasting me very well.
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I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.
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Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.
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The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
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There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.
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At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
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If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England – you couldn’t have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.
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I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.
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Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
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Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
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I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.
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The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
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Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.
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Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‘I’d like to write about that.’ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.
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If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.
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Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‘Run like hell and all of fire.’ You don’t want modesty, you want humility.
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I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.
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We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.
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I became the kind of parent my mother was to me.
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I got my own back.
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For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‘Here I am, read me.’ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.
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The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama‘s entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.
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Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.
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I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.
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During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.
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Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.
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If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
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