"I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true."

"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."

"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."

"Sugar cane reach up to GodAnd every baby cryingShame the blanket of my nightAnd all my days are dying."

"At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people."

"Go," she whispered. "Go. Show them you spell your name W-O-M-A-N."

"I learned to love my son without wanting to possess him and I learned how to teach him to teach himself."

"Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift."

"In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric. He must believe his ends to be served all things and people can justifiably be shifted about, or that he is the center not only of his own world but of the worlds which others inhabit."

"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"

"We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily - as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable."

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

"A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy, a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim."

"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"

"I am a WomanPhenomenally.Phenomenal Woman,that's me."

"Remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned...you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make adaptations, in love, in relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind."

"All great achievements require time."

"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."

"I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe."

"As soon as healing takes place, go out and heal somebody else."

"Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait."

"Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence-neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish-it is an imponderably valuable gift."

"While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man."

"Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants."

"Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth."

"Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."

"I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories."

"The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are."

"To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist."

"When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief. The near-occult feeling: The face of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things. Even if the succeeding sensations are not common, they are at least not mysterious."

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

"If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape."

"We need to develop courage, and we need to develop it in small ways first..... You develop a little courage, so that if you decide, "I will not stay in rooms where women are belittled; I will not stay in company where races, no matter who they are, are belittled; I will not take it; I will not sit around and accept dehumanising other human beings: - if you decide to do that in small ways, and you continue to do it - finally you realize you've got so much courage. Imagine it - you've got so much courage that people want to be around you. They get a feeling that they will be protected in your company."

"I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed."

"If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded."

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

"Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time."

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

"I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people."

"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."

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."

"Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou?"

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

"I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss."

"I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh."

"That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, 'Cant do is like Dont Care.' Neither of them have a home."

"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."

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

"What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain."

"If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it's almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. 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. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up."