“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”
0 likes
Author detail
Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she earned the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Source: Wikipedia
Quotes
Showing 261-280 of 324
“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“Courage - you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn't want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself.”
0 likes
“You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race an...”
0 likes
“When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and d...”
0 likes
“I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.”
0 likes
“It's very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.”
0 likes
“I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind...”
0 likes
“Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”
0 likes
“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...”
0 likes
“I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence...”
0 likes
“Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.”
0 likes
“When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, 'Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I....”
0 likes
“A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.”
0 likes
“I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.”
0 likes
“Information helps you to see that you're not alone. That there's somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who've all longed and lost, who've all been happy. So the li...”
0 likes
“I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like...”
0 likes
“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”
0 likes
“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.”
0 likes
“I wasn't a pretty girl. I was six feet tall at 15, you know.”
0 likes