Maya Angelou Quotes

You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been.

If people do not know where they have been and what they have been they don't know what they are. They don't know where they going to have to go or where they still have to be.

It's best to know a little about where you're coming from and why you've arrived where you are.

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.

It's better to know your story than not to know.

If you don't know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it's kind of hard to put things together.

We have to have a very clear understanding of ourselves.

U don't know where u goin unless u know where u come from.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

I've just tried to keep my eyes open, tried to read everything you can, and tried to see whether I see myself within it. If I do, then I can get excited about it.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

I once read that people who study others are wise but those who study themselves are enlightened.

The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world.

If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.

We read books to find out who we are.

How can one learn to know oneself? Never by introspection, rather by action.

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

Half my life is an act of revision.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

After a long run of almost thirty years, you get to the point where you say, 'These are my concerns.' It's not so much this is what I set out to claim - it is a kind of refrain.