Top 258 Quotes by Maya Angelou

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels.

If you want what you're saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody's life. Your own, first.

I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I'm a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself - all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

Courage - you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn't want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself.

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 wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Bitterness is cancer - it eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure.

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.

I do like to have guns around. I don't like to carry them. But I like - if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them.