Maya Angelou

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.

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

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

She stepped out barefoot on to the grass, her soul naked, sun beating to her heart’s rhythm, bathing her skin. In her mind, she had already escaped.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.’

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

What you can’t pay back you pay forward.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Things do not change; we change.