Top 500 Maya Angelou Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.”

— Maya Angelou

352. “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.”

— Maya Angelou

353. “Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other.”

— Maya Angelou

354. “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.”

— Maya Angelou

355. “The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as heck we should never teach.”

— Maya Angelou

356. “There is a spirit in all music, the spirit has the ability to conjure up thoughts even pictures of something that happened or you wished would happen or you anticipate happening. Music has the ability to create ideas in you and me. It has the ability to encourage us to be creative.”

— Maya Angelou

357. “If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self.”

— Maya Angelou

358. “My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.”

— Maya Angelou

359. “It is important that we learn humility, which says there was someone else before me who paid for me. My responsibility is to prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who is yet to come.”

— Maya Angelou

360. “Modesty is a learned affectation. It’s no good. Humility is great, because humility says, ‘There was someone before me. I’m following in somebody’s footsteps.’”

— Maya Angelou

361. “Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.”

— Maya Angelou

362. “Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.”

— Maya Angelou

363. “If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves.”

— Maya Angelou

364. “Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives. The struggle for equality continues unabated, and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory.”

— Maya Angelou

365. “I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life .”

— Maya Angelou

366. “I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.”

— Maya Angelou

367. “People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.”

— Maya Angelou

368. “If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.”

— Maya Angelou

369. “We have it in us to be splendid.”

— Maya Angelou

370. “Let us live so we do not regret years of inertia and ignorance, so when we die we can say all of our energy was dedicated to the noble liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own.”

— Maya Angelou

371. “We will sometimes have defeats in life but you can have defeats without being defeated, you could fail without being a failure. When you see failure and defeats as merely part of the process to get to when.”

— Maya Angelou

372. “If I insist on being pessimistic, there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed.”

— Maya Angelou

373. “The best candy shop a child can be left alone in, is the library.”

— Maya Angelou

374. “Everybody is worth everything.”

— Maya Angelou

375. “Rainbows are people whose lives are bright, shining examples for others.”

— Maya Angelou

376. “Shakespeare must be a black girl.”

— Maya Angelou

377. “In spite of everything that was done to me and my race, in spite of the adversity and the bitter moments, again we rise.”

— Maya Angelou

378. “My pride had been starched by a family who assumed unlimited authority in its own affairs.”

— Maya Angelou

379. “Love is a condition so powerful; it may be that which pulls the stars in the firmament. It may be that which pushes and urges the blood in the veins. Courage: you have to have courage to love somebody because you risk everything-ever ything.”

— Maya Angelou

380. “If you have a song to sing, who are you not to open your mouth and sing to the world?”

— Maya Angelou

381. “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.”

— Maya Angelou

382. “I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.”

— Maya Angelou

383. “Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.”

— Maya Angelou

384. “We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay – and rise!”

— Maya Angelou

385. “It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.”

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

387. “The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.”

— Maya Angelou

388. “Be wary when a naked person offers you his shirt.”

— Maya Angelou

389. “This is what I am learning, at 82 years old: the main thing is to be in love with the search for truth.”

— Maya Angelou

390. “Every Day you should reach out and touch someone.”

— Maya Angelou

391. “To be human is to be challenged to be more divine. Not even to try to meet such a challenge is the biggest defeat imaginable.”

— Maya Angelou

392. “Let the brain go to work, let it meet the heart and you will be able to forgive.”

— Maya Angelou

393. “All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.”

— Maya Angelou

394. “We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”

— Maya Angelou

395. “That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.”

— Maya Angelou

396. “Love recognizes no barriers.”

— Maya Angelou

397. “We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.”

— Maya Angelou

398. “Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.””

— Maya Angelou

399. “Sisterhood means if you happen to be in Burma and I happen to be in San Diego and I’m married to someone who is very jealous and you’re married to somebody who is very possessive, if you call me in the middle of the night, I have to come.”

— Maya Angelou

400. “Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.”

— Maya Angelou