Quotes from Maya Angelou

You can never be great at anything unless you love it.

It's true. I can do anything and do it well because God loves me. It still humbles me.

Exchange love for hate...Thereby, making the present comfortable and the future promising.

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.

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

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.

Yet it is only love which sets us free.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.

Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.

Be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud.

There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself about complaining. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.

A friend may be waiting behind a stranger's face.

I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.