Maya Angelou

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.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.

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

I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

Life is tough, my darling, but so are you.

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly – a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Nature hates calculators.

Seek not to be Rich, but Happy. The one lies in Bags, the other in Content: which Wealth can never give.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.