Maya Angelou Life Quotations

The happy heart runs with the river, floats on the air, lifts to the music, soars with the eagle, hopes with the prayer.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.

I believe 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. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.

If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.

Life loves the person who dares to live it.

I had to trust life and believe that life loved the person who dared to live it.

I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating.

You only are free when you realize you belong no place - you belong every place - no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.

Live life as if it were created just for you.

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 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.

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.

I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.

When you know better you do better.

If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?

Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you.

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.

When members of a society wish to secure that society's rich heritage they cherish their arts and respect their artists. The esteem with which we regard the multiple cultures offered in our country enhances our possibilities for healthy survival and continued social development.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.

The intensity with which young people live demands that they "blank out" as often as possible.

He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.

Faith is the evidence of the unseen.

Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free. A Brave and Startling Truth.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

It is sad but true that sometimes we need the tragedy to help us to see how human we are and how we are more alike than we are different.

We are only as blind as we want to be.

The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

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

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

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

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

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.

The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?

Be wary when a naked person offers you his shirt

If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape

Nothing succeeds like success. Get a little success, and then just get a little more.

The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.

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 unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

I might have it at six-fifteen a.m. just as soon as I get in, but usually it's about eleven o'clock when I'll have a glass of sherry.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.

I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.

I would say you might encounter many defeats but you must never be defeated, ever. In fact, it might even be necessary to confront defeat. It might be necessary, to get over it, all the way through it, and go on. I would teach her to laugh a lot. Laugh a lot at the - and the silliest things and be very, very serious. I'd teach her to love life, I can bet you that.

When asked how she knows when her writing is where she wants it to be: "I know when it's the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it's the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that."

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.

The problem I have with haters is that they see my glory, but they don't know my story...

Life loves the liver of it.

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.

Determine to live life with flair and laughter.

I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life...her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.

On the day of your birth, the Creator filled countless storehouses, set aside for your use and yours alone.

What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.

Continue to be bold, courageous. Try to choose the wisest thing and once you've chosen the wisest thing go out and try to achieve it. Be it.

I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being- what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

We are here to love each other. That is why you are alive. That is what life is for.

I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.

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.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

Remember, people will judge you by your actions not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold but so does a hard-boiled egg.

Life is a gift, and i try to respond with grace and courtesy.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.

Love life. Engage in it. Give it all you've got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

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.

I would like to be known as an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who teaches by being.

You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.

When you learn, teach, when you get, give.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong.

Christians already? It seems to me that it takes a lifetime of work.

And one of my absolute favorite quotes of all-time, one that I've adopted as one of my greatest life mottos: Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."

The woman who truly intends to live a good life is already living phenomenally since intent is part of the achievement.

Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.

You might encounter defeats but you must never be defeated... Love a lot. Laugh a lot at the silliest things and be very serious... love life.

Light and shadow are opposite sides of the same coin. We can illuminate our paths or darken our way. It is a matter of choice.

Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

Hope for the best, be prepared for the worse. Life is shocking, but you must never appear to be shocked. For no matter how bad it is it could be worse and no matter how good it is it could be better.

You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for

All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.

To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents

Don't let the incidents which take place in life bring you low. And certainly don't whine. You can be brought low, that's OK, but don't be reduced by them. Just say, 'That's life.'

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise!

Success is loving life and daring to live it.