iNsPiRaTiOn: Maya Angelou

• "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."
• "We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated."
• "You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off you."
• "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it."
• "My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return."
• "Most people just get older, and they find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, choose personal preferences in drink, have the nerve to get married and have children, and they call that growing up. That's not. That's getting older."
• "Nothing will work unless you do."
• "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
• "All great achievements require time."
• "There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."
• "If you don't like something change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
• "I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."
• "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
• "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."
• "While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation."

~~~ quotes by Maya Angelou ~~~