- "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
-- Maya Angelou - "A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent. "
-- Maya Angelou - "A woman who is convinced that she deserves to accept only the best challenges herself to give the best. Then she is living phenomenally."
-- Maya Angelou - "Achievement brings its own anticlimax."
-- Maya Angelou - "All great achievements require time."
-- Maya Angelou - "All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened."
-- Maya Angelou - "All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood."
-- Maya Angelou - "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
-- Maya Angelou - "As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them."
-- Maya Angelou - "At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice."
-- Maya AngelouAmerican Authors of the 2... - "Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean."
-- Maya Angelou - "Black women have not historically stood in the pulpit, but that doesn't undermine the fact that they built the churches and maintain the pulpits."
-- Maya Angelou - "Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."
-- Maya Angelou - "Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."
-- Maya Angelou - "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."
-- Maya Angelou - "Each of us has the right and the responsibility to asses the road which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the feature road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting-inviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well."
-- Maya Angelou - "Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations."
-- Maya Angelou - "Effective action is always unjust."
-- Maya Angelou - "For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place."
-- Maya Angelou - "How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!"
-- Maya AngelouAfrican Style Squares - "I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people."
-- Maya Angelou - "I answer the heroic question "Death, where is they sting?" with "It is here in my heart and mind and memories.""
-- Maya Angelou - "I believe that every person is born with talent."
-- Maya Angelou - "I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water."
-- Maya Angelou - "I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed."
-- Maya Angelou - "I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."
-- Maya Angelou - "I made the decision to quit show business. Give up the skintight dresses and manicured smiles. The false concern over sentimental lyrics. I would never again work to make people smile inanely and would take on the responsibility of making them think."
-- Maya Angelou - "I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive."
-- Maya Angelou - "I try to live what I consider a "poetic existence." That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work."
-- Maya Angelou (In "Words of Women Quotations for Success") - "If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities."
-- Maya Angelou - "If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die."
-- Maya AngelouAfrican Style - "If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
-- Maya Angelou - "If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded."
-- Maya Angelou - "If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers."
-- Maya Angelou - "In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric."
-- Maya Angelou - "It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength."
-- Maya Angelou - "Life loves the liver of it."
-- Maya Angelou - "Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ''I'm with you kid. Let's go.''
-- Maya Angelou - "Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations."
-- Maya Angelou - "Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other."
-- Maya Angelou - "Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."
-- Maya Angelou () - "Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness."
-- Maya AngelouArtist's Garden at Giverny, 1900 - "My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return."
-- Maya Angelou - "My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself."
-- Maya Angelou - "My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."
-- Maya Angelou - "Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, "I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway."
-- Maya Angelou - "Nobody, but nobody, Can make it out here alone."
-- Maya Angelou - "Nothing will work unless you do."
-- Maya Angelou - "Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God."
-- Maya Angelou - "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."
-- Maya Angelou - "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."
-- Maya Angelou - "Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible."
-- Maya Angelou - "Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."
-- Maya Angelou - "She began the first of what we later called 'my lessons in living.' She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy."
-- Maya Angelou () - " Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence - neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish - it is an imponderably valuable gift."
-- Maya Angelou - "Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater."
-- Maya Angelou - "Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it."
-- Maya Angelou (In "Black Women Writers at Work") - "The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance."
-- Maya Angelou - "The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear."
-- Maya Angelou - "The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind."
-- Maya Angelou - "The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education."
-- Maya Angelou - "The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed."
-- Maya Angelou - "The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned pricks more deeply and draws more blood."
-- 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."
-- Maya Angelou - "There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it."
-- Maya Angelou - "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
-- Maya Angelou - "There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."
-- Maya Angelou - "There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth."
-- Maya Angelou - "We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color."
-- Maya Angelou - "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."
-- Maya Angelou - "We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated."
-- Maya Angelou - "Without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues."
-- Maya Angelou - "While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation."
-- Maya Angelou - "Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning."
-- Maya Angelou
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by Maya Angelou
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