Maya Angelou

When you know better, you do better.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

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.

We need much less than we think we need.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I’m with you kid. Let’s go.”

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

A private Life is to be preferred; the Honor and Gain of publick Posts, bearing no proportion with the Comfort of it

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, neverin nothing, great or small, large or pettynever give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…