Quotes from Maya Angelou

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.

Blacks should be used to play whites. For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices, and even their odors. Often our survival had depended on the accurate reading of a white man's chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman's hand.

Whining is not only graceless, but it can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.

I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you.' There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

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.

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.

I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that's me.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.

God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us — in the dreariest and most dreaded moments — can see a possibility of hope.

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."

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.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

You may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.

I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.

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

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.