Maya Angelou

"To those who are given much, much is expected."

"I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true."

"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."

"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."

"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope."

"That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, 'Cant do is like Dont Care.' Neither of them have a home."

"In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free."

"Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time."

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style."

"What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come."

"Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age."

"It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable."

"The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise."

"I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."

"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."

"Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life."

"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."

"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope."

"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth."

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style."