Maya Angelou Quotes

From birth to death you go on living, groping in darkness with no light - and you could have created the light. You cannot find it in the scriptures; nobody can hand it to you. It is not purchased or sold; it is nontransferable. But you can create it - you can put all your energies together. You can start living consciously from this very moment.

I stopped caring what people thought.

The philosophy of fasting calls upon us to know ourselves, to master ourselves, and to discipline ourselves the better to free ourselves. To fast is to identify our dependencies, and free ourselves from them.

It took me a long, long time to break the chains that's inside me.

I've stopped caring what people think.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

I think people sleepwalk through their lives, and for me, I wanted to embrace everything. And that meant the agonizing pain and the transcendence, and you can't have one without the other.

Anything you believe you have to do or become before you can be free is a denial and distraction from the truth that you are already free.

One of the marvels of the world: The sight of a soul sitting in prison with the key in its hand.

O Divine Providence, I ask not for more riches but more wisdom with which to make wiser use of the riches you gave me at birth, consisting in the power to control and direct my own mind to whatever ends I might desire.

I don't want things that I regret in life, and things that I have not done - and I don't want to at 80 years wake up, and tell myself: 'Oh I was on top of my shape and skills and I didn't do it.'

Admit at least one painful truth to yourself every day. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not immeasurably superior to all your friends. Exercises of this sort, prolonged through several years, will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.

I don't hold on to fear as much as I used to, because I've learned a lot about genuinely not caring what strangers think about me. It's very liberating. It's very empowering, and I've learned a lot of that from Jay-Shawn Carter-Z, because his approach to life is very internal. It's a very good lesson to learn.

My religion is to live and die without regret.

When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me, it was a discovery of self. I had faith that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and [that] I'm responsible.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

Escape your situation through your mind and your actions.

Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion's roar.

You have tremendous gifts to give; God sent them with you when you came to this earth. And while you might forget them, or doubt they exist, God does not forget and He will show them to you. As soon as your gifts are dedicated to His work, they will blossom. Chains that might have held you back for years will dissolve. And you will feel free. You will learn that your spirit is bigger than your circumstances, as soon as you put your spirit first.

All human beings have failings, all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another's failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves. If at the end one can say, This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task, then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets.

Man's experience in the world is to enable him to get out of its whirlpool.

We must each lead a way of life with self-awareness and compassion, to do as much as we can. Then, whatever happens we will have no regrets.

What I've lost in years I've gained in wisdom. Bullshit, I haven't learnt one thing in the last 15 years that hasn't just depressed me more.

Whatever you do, don’t wake up at 65 years old and think about what you should have done with your life.