Maya Angelou Quotes
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801. “I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?”

— Maya Angelou

802. “You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‘I’m a representative. ’”

— Maya Angelou

803. “Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.”

— Maya Angelou

804. “You’re not serious; you’re boring as hell.”

— Maya Angelou

805. “It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It is imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history.”

— Maya Angelou

806. “Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.”

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

808. “Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.”

— Maya Angelou

Featured in: Real Quotes

809. “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

810. “Love recognizes no barriers.”

— Maya Angelou

811. “And if a person is religious, I think it’s good, it helps you a bit. But if you’re not, at least you can have the sense that there is a condition inside you which looks at the stars with amazement and awe.”

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

813. “If we live long enough, we may even get over war. I imagine a time when somebody will mention the word war and everyone in the room will start to laugh. And what do you mean war?”

— Maya Angelou

814. “The truth will lead me to all.”

— Maya Angelou

815. “Let me tell so much truth. I want to tell the truth in my work. The truth will lead me to all.”

— Maya Angelou

816. “You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for.”

— Maya Angelou

817. “I try to see every day as a celebration.”

— Maya Angelou

818. “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

819. “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

820. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

821. “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

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

— Maya Angelou

823. “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

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

— Maya Angelou

825. “I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.”

— Maya Angelou

826. “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

827. “When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement.”

— Maya Angelou

828. “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

829. “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

830. “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

831. “All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.”

— Maya Angelou

832. “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

833. “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

834. “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

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

— Maya Angelou

836. “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

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

— Maya Angelou

838. “In a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.”

— Maya Angelou

839. “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

840. “I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating.”

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

842. “In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons.”

— Maya Angelou

843. “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

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

— Maya Angelou

845. “Education is a process that goes on ’til death. The moment you see someone who knows she has found the one true way, and can call all the others false, then you know you’re in the company of an ignoramus.”

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

848. “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.’”

— Maya Angelou

849. “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

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

— Maya Angelou