Top 500 Maya Angelou Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.”

— Maya Angelou

452. “The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects – nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs – ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I’m most happy to be a writer.”

— Maya Angelou

453. “The truth will lead me to all.”

— Maya Angelou

454. “I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.”

— Maya Angelou

455. “As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”

— Maya Angelou

456. “A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true.”

— Maya Angelou

457. “Courage, I don’t think anybody is born with courage. I think you may be born with a flair to braggadocio, you know. That’s not courage.”

— Maya Angelou

458. “Oh, the holiness of being the injured party.”

— Maya Angelou

459. “Each time a dancer moves devoutly or a composer faithfully searches the silence for the veiled melodies, eternity is engaged.”

— Maya Angelou

460. “Try, start always at home. This is my encouragement to all writers, start at home. All virtues and vices begin at home, and then spread abroad.”

— Maya Angelou

461. “I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me – I didn’t know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn’t know it then, and I know more now.”

— Maya Angelou

462. “I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.”

— Maya Angelou

463. “Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.”

— Maya Angelou

464. “In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.”

— Maya Angelou

465. “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.”

— Maya Angelou

466. “The truth is you never can leave home. You take it with you everywhere you go. It’s under your skin. It moves the tongue or slows it, colors the thinking, impedes upon the logic.”

— Maya Angelou

467. “A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a woman called by a devaluing name will only be weakened by the misnomer.”

— Maya Angelou

468. “I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona – no lime. If the phone rings, I won’t answer until I’m done.”

— Maya Angelou

469. “The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, then disappearing into the utter blackness.”

— Maya Angelou

470. “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”

— Maya Angelou

471. “We are the victims of the world’s most comprehensive robbery. Life demands a balance. It’s all right if we do a little robbing now.”

— Maya Angelou

472. “To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.”

— Maya Angelou

473. “The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear.”

— Maya Angelou

474. “If men are God’s gift to women, then God must really love gag gifts.”

— Maya Angelou

475. “Do not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness.”

— Maya Angelou

476. “Independence is a heady draught, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.”

— Maya Angelou

477. “Life offers us tickets to places which we have not knowingly asked for.”

— Maya Angelou

478. “Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity.”

— Maya Angelou

479. “When I passed forty I dropped pretense, ’cause men like women who got some sense.”

— Maya Angelou

480. “I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.”

— Maya Angelou

481. “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.”

— Maya Angelou

482. “In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like.”

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

484. “The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.”

— Maya Angelou

485. “Everything costs and costs the earth.”

— Maya Angelou

486. “Anyone of us can be a rainbow in somebody’s clouds. I want the University of Cincinnati to be a rainbow in the clouds. The University of Cincinnati is really a possibility of hope; it is a rainbow.”

— Maya Angelou

487. “We must infuse our lives with art. Our national leaders must be informed that we want them to use our taxes to support street theatre in order to oppose street gangs. We should have a well-supported regional theatre in order to oppose regionalism and.”

— Maya Angelou

488. “Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise.”

— Maya Angelou

489. “I think that that’s the wisest thing – to prevent illness before we try to cure something.”

— Maya Angelou

490. “He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.”

— Maya Angelou

491. “It’s very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.”

— Maya Angelou

492. “Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don’t understand but something I’m able to harness and use.”

— Maya Angelou

493. “The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US – in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.”

— Maya Angelou

494. “Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright’s pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.”

— Maya Angelou

495. “If a person – any human being – is told often enough, “You are nothing. You are nothing. You account for nothing. You count for nothing. You are less than a human being. I have no visibility of you”, the person finally begins to believe it.”

— Maya Angelou

496. “Take the blinders from your vision take the padding from your ears and confess you’ve heard me crying and admit you’ve seen my tears.”

— Maya Angelou

497. “The first thing I do in the morning when I awaken is say, ‘Thank you, Lord!’ I’m grateful to be alive, and I’m going to try to tell the truth as well as I know and tell it as eloquently as I can so that people can hear it.”

— Maya Angelou

498. “The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.”

— Maya Angelou

499. “When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‘Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.’”

— Maya Angelou

500. “When it looks like the sun isn’t going to shine any more, God puts a rainbow in the clouds. Each one of us has the possibility, the responsibility, the probability to be the rainbow in the clouds.”

— Maya Angelou