Maya Angelou

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

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.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr.

Remember who you are.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

I heartily accept the motto,That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

Language is the archives of history.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.