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Maya Angelou Quotes

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 

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
- Maya Angelou

The needs of society determine its ethics.
- 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

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

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
- Maya Angelou
 
I answer the heroic question 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is here in my heart and mind and memories.'
- 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  

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.
- 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

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 have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
- Maya Angelou

The honorary duty of a human being is to love.
- Maya Angelou

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

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

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.
- Maya Angelou

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

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

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

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
- Maya Angelou

Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.
- 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

Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.
- Maya Angelou

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
- Maya Angelou

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
- Maya Angelou

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told, 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.'
- Maya Angelou

I know why the caged bird sings.
- Maya Angelou

I believe that every person is born with talent.
- Maya Angelou

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.
- Maya Angelou
 
I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people.
- Maya Angelou

In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.
- Maya Angelou
 
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
- 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

Effective action is always unjust.
- Maya Angelou

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
- Maya Angelou

The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear.
- Maya Angelou

I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.
- Maya Angelou

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
- Maya Angelou

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
- 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
 
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
- 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

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

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

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."
- Maya Angelou

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
- Maya Angelou

Nothing will work unless you do.
- 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

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
- Maya Angelou

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
- Maya Angelou

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.
- Maya Angelou

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. - from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Maya Angelou

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
- 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

Lyrical poetry is out for the time being, and something that is called rap or hip-hop is in. It is still poetry, and we can't live without it. We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of -- to explain the pains and glory of our existence.
- Maya Angelou

Being a woman is hard work.
- Maya Angelou

The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou

Amazon.com: Brought together for the first time here are all of Maya Angelou's published poems -- including "On the Pulse of Morning," her inaugural poem -- in a handsome hardcover edition.

James Baldwin: You will hear the regal woman, the mischievous street girl; you will hear the price of black woman's survival and you will hear of her generosity. Black, bitter, and beautiful, she speaks of our survival.

Book Description: For the first time, the complete collection of Maya Angelou's published poems-including "On the Pulse of Morning"-in a permanent collectible, handsome hardcover edition.

Ingram: Presents a definitive collection of poetry from Angelou's previous anthologies-- Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water, Oh Pray my Wings Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, I Shall Not Be Moved, On the Pulse of Morning, and Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? 50,000 first printing.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Amazon.com: In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou

Amazon.com: It's been a long time coming, but A Song Flung Up to Heaven triumphantly completes the six volumes of autobiography that began nearly 30 years ago with Maya Angelou's astonishingly successful I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a work that changed readers' perceptions of what autobiographical writing could achieve. The impact of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (which evoked the author's adolescence and sexual abuse in Arkansas) was unprecedented. It combined frankness and emotional force with a nuanced, poetic style--a style that Angelou has perhaps found more elusive recently. But it's here again, as affecting as ever. The book deals with the years 1964-68, a turbulent period in which Angelou came back to America after her African sojourn. This, of course, was the time of the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; Angelou was on the point of working with the latter in the civil rights movement. Her voice is fresh and exhilarating as she deals with the tragedies and triumphs of a packed life, and there are some set-piece moments, such as her account of the misguided revenge she took on an ex-lover.

Many women have become celebrated as writers and poets, but Angelou has also enjoyed a distinguished career as a civil rights activist, producer, performer, actress, and filmmaker. With all of this under her belt, she can be forgiven for the note of self-congratulation that creeps in at times. But for those who've followed her unique writing, this is a journey into a fascinating life and a riveting picture of a divided America, always informed with that clear-sighted vision Angelou is famous for. --Barry Forshaw, Amazon.co.uk

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou, Paul Gauguin, Linda Sunshine

Phenomenal Woman is a phenomenal poem that speaks to us of where we are as women at the dawn of a new century. In a clear voice, Maya Angelou vividly reminds us of our towering strength and beauty. Here is a poem that radiates wisdom and conviction, renewing our belief in the glory and tender mercies of our gender.

Married to the extraordinary paintings Paul Gauguin, this book becomes a visionary commemoration of all that is wondrous in women. Gauguin painted women with exuberance and joy, reveling in their strength and beauty. His portraits are of women of color, women of power, women who gaze out at the viewer with the same quiet resolve and inner mystery that Angelou celebrates in her poem.

Though Gauguin died twenty-five years before Angelou was born and these two artists lived very different lives in very different cultures, their work coalesces perfectly in this one glorious volume.

Here is the ultimate gift for the phenomenal woman in your life--wife, lover, relative, teacher, friend. There's hardly a woman alive today who will not relate to the words of the poet Maya Angelou and the images of painter Paul Gauguin.