Maya Angelou Quotes

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

“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.”

“We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated.”

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

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

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

“When you know better, you do better.”

“Nothing will work unless you do.”

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

“Seek patience and passion in equal amounts. Patience alone will not build the temple. Passion alone will destroy its walls.”

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”

“I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.”

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

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

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

“I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.”

“This testimony from a black sister marks the beginning of a new era in the minds and hearts of all black men and women. Her portrait is a biblical study in life in the midst of death.”

“Maya Angelou writes like a song, and like the truth. She accomplishes the rare feat of laying her own life open to a reader's scrutiny without the reflex-covering gesture of melodrama or shame.”

“The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.”

“I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best — I mean, when I'm at my best — of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose or I missed everything.”

“It's so tempting that when I'm really in bad shape I sing, sing — and my mom and my son will find me wherever I am and stay with me and see me through that period because it's there — it's saying come. I can make life so simple for you. You'll never have to explain anything again.”

“One isn't born with courage. One develops it. And you develop it by doing small, courageous things, in the same way that one wouldn't set out to pick up a hundred pound bag of rice.”

“Being free is as difficult and as perpetual — or rather fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Moslem or a good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done.”

“I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart. If he could know my heart, a black woman in the 20th century, a single parent — all the things I was ere to — then obviously I could know a Chinese Mandarin's heart and the heart of a young Jewish boy with braces on his teeth in Brooklyn.”