Some of My Favorite Maya Angelou Quotes

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'"

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

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

"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."

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

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

“Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”

“I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.”

"Nothing can dim the light which shines from within."

"While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated."

"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."

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”