Quote

I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you.' There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

Maya Angelou

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Maya Angelou
Age: 86 †
Born: 1928
Born: April 4
Died: 2014
Died: May 28
Author
Autobiographer
Comedian
Dancer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Producer
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Politician
St. Louis
Missouri
Marguerite Annie Johnson
Marguerite Johnson
Marguerite Ann Johnson
Marguerite Anne Johnson
Saying
Inspirational
Shirt
Tell
Shirts
Persons
African
Person
Naked
Love
Careful
People
Offers
Trust

More quotes by Maya Angelou

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I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.
Maya Angelou
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I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Maya Angelou
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It's very hard for adults to maintain respect and romance so that a love affair can be sustained over years.
Maya Angelou
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A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a woman called by a devaluing name will only be weakened by the misnomer.
Maya Angelou
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I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment.
Maya Angelou
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In the fifties, you have your beauty as a treat. I thought that until I hit the sixties.In your sixties, life decides to reward you with certain kinds of profound appreciation, so that people name their children and schools and libraries after you! And you still have your sexuality and your sensuality. If you want your sexuality, you still have it.
Maya Angelou
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Age is nothing waking up is everything.
Maya Angelou
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Every day offers you 10,000 reasons to cry, but if you can find just one reason to laugh then you will be all right.
Maya Angelou
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Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older.
Maya Angelou
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In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.
Maya Angelou
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When we decide to be happy we accept the responsibility to bring happiness to someone else.
Maya Angelou
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Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.
Maya Angelou
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Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise. Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear, I rise.
Maya Angelou
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Try, start always at home. This is my encouragement to all writers, start at home. All virtues and vices begin at home, and then spread abroad.
Maya Angelou
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There is no place where God is not.
Maya Angelou
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By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was indulgent never. Kind, yes, permissive, never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell.
Maya Angelou
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Christians already? It seems to me that it takes a lifetime of work.
Maya Angelou
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Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.
Maya Angelou
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It is better to control oneself, if one can, and not hit back. But on certain occasions, it is imperative to defend oneself. I don't think it's fair to ask anybody not to defend herself or himself.
Maya Angelou
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I always felt, if I can get to a library, I'll be OK.
Maya Angelou