Maya Angelou Quotes

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

“You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot; it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.”

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

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”

“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”

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

“I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.”

“When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you're inviting a person into your life.”

“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.”

“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.”

“How important it is for us to recognise and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!”

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”

“We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men. We are who we are because they were who they were. It's wise to know where you come from, who called your name.”

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

“We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognise that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.”

“What is a fear of living? It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.”

“Independence is a heady draught, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.”

“I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment.”

“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.”

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

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”

“Won't it be wonderful when black history and Native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.”

“Equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.”

“All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.”

“Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.”