Maya Angelou

We need much less than we think we need.

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.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

My life is a struggle.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day – farther and wider – and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.