Marguerite Annie Johnson Angelou, or most commonly known as Maya Angelou, was best known for her first nonfiction best-seller, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Aside from being an award-winning author, Angelou was also an actress, dancer, poet, screenwriter, and civil rights activist who believed that we should all live with passion while living our lives to the fullest. She was an advocate for courage, creativity, forgiveness, kindness, and love, among many other things.
Enjoy this wonderful collection of 68 Maya Angelou quotes about love, courage, life, education, success, and many more.
Maya Angelou Quotes About Love
1. “Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.”
2. “If we lose love and self-respect for each other, this is how we finally die.”
3. “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.”
4. “If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.”
5. “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.”
6. “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
7. “If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.”
Maya Angelou Quotes About Courage
1. “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”
2. “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.”
Related: Most Inspirational Quotes about Courage
3. “A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.”
4. “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.”
5. “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
Maya Angelou Quotes on Life
1. “I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.”
2. “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.”
3. “There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.”
4. “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.”
5. “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
6. “Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I’m with you kid. Let’s go.”
7. “At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.”
8. “Life loves the liver of it.”
9. “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 Quotes About Education
1. “All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideas are threatened.”
2. “Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”
3. “There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”
4. “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
5. “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.”
6. “While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.”
7. “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.”
8. “It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”
9. “The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
Maya Angelou Quotes About Success
1. “The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.”
2. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
3. “Nothing will work unless you do.”
4. “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
5. “All great achievements require time.”
6. “Achievement brings its own anticlimax.”
7. “If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.”
Maya Angelou, More Quotes And Sayings
1. “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”
2. “Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”
3. “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
4. “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.”
5. “Effective action is always unjust.”
6. “Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”
7. “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
8. “Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.”
9. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
10. “How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!”
11. “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
12. “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.”
13. “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.”
14. “It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because 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.”
15. “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.”
16. “I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”
17. “I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.”
18. “There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
19. “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.”
20. “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.”
21. “Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.”
22. “A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.”
23. “I believe that every person is born with talent.”
24. “A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
25. “It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.”
26. “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.”
27. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
28. “Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, ‘Children’s Letters to God.’ You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.”
29. “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.”
30. “Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.”
31. “I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.”
If you enjoyed these collections of Maya Angelou quotes and would want to know more about her works, we would suggest you read Maya Angelou’s debut memoir to learn more about her story and advocacies in life.