Maya Angelou

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

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

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.

All great achievements require time.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.