5 Eloquent and Enduring Maya Angelou Quotes

This quote appeared in Angelou's sixth autobiography, "A Song Flung Up to Heaven," which chronicles her life between 1965 and 1968. In context, Angelou was referring to a man named Phil, who told her that he was ornery and a crazy liar when they first met. Weeks later, he purposely stopped on railroad tracks while Angelou was in his car, taking off just in time to narrowly miss an approaching train. The incident scared Angelou deeply and convinced her that he was indeed as ornery as he had proclaimed himself. But this was a lesson that likely reared its head many times over the course of her life.

"People took advantage of her in the usual ways — so she had learned to be suspicious of motives," says Wagner-Martin, acknowledging all the jobs Angelou worked to support herself and her son (these included fry cook, streetcar conductor, sex worker and nightclub singer). "By the time she became the impressive public speaker that people remember, she had lived through decades of penury, decades of various betrayals: She knew how unkind people could be, but her message in her dynamic lectures remained positive."

The quote is sometimes phrased as, "When people show you who they are, believe them," and Oprah Winfrey added her own twist on this. Winfrey considered Angelou a close friend and mentor and in a 1997 episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Winfrey recalled discussing a boyfriend, who continuously stood her up, with Angelou. Angelou reminded her of the life lesson and asked her why she didn't get it the first time he showed he was unreliable? So, Winfrey said her adjunct to Angelou's quote is, "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time."

Angelou was no stranger to adversity. She didn't speak for several years after being raped as a child. She was profoundly devastated by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as she'd worked with King and been friends with Malcolm. And she struggled with romance and money. Yet her story is not mired in tragedy.

Before becoming a memoirist, Angelou was a poet. One of her most popular poems, "Still I Rise," addresses her personal difficulties and the collective hardships of Black people, responding to them with hope and perseverance. In the poem, she acknowledged the hard truths of history while envisioning a bright future.

"Her poems, particularly the early ones, grew from songs that she had written while she was a dancer, singer and actress. Angelou drew from not only American music but African, from free forms that were universal, and she emphasized the sounds her poems created," says Wagner-Martin. "In these longer poems, she is speaking for so much human consciousness, such broad sympathy, that her personal words reach into other people's lives, something like an anthem might in a musical program at church."

This very popular poem also came from Angelou's book of poetry "And Still I Rise" and was later anthologized in 1995's "<a>Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women</a>." It's a celebration of womanhood, where the speaker, presumably Angelou, explains what makes her so irresistible to men, even though, as the poem says, "I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size."  

In an interview with Angelou, journalist Bill Moyers emphasized that she had "done almost anything [she] wanted to" and asked her about the price she paid for that freedom.  Her response was, "You are only free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all."

"Place, then, was more of an attitude than it was a physical house. And she learned to expand that sense of a stable, given identity, during the years she lived in Africa, where she found good employment, good friends and self-confidence," says Wagner-Martin. "Was her home in Arkansas? Was it in California? Was it in Africa? Was it in New York? And for the last 20 years of her life, was it in Winston-Salem, North Carolina? She manages through words to make readers see how unimportant 'place' really is."

In 1993, Angelou became the second person ever to read a poem at a U.S. presidential inauguration. She composed and read "On the Pulse of Morning," the poem in which the above lines appear, at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton.

The poem was tuned to the inaugural spirit of renewal and hope, but it was still in Angelou's wheelhouse. It highlighted themes of unity, optimism and courage that she often imbued in her literature. "She understood how much bravery life demanded, and she took on any challenge that she saw," says Wagner-Martin.

While the poem itself wasn't a fan favorite, people praised her performance of the poem and the inspiration it provided. By this time, Angelou was well-established as an advocate for social change and a celebrity artist. Her recording of the poem won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album in 1994, and sales of her other works increased in the wake of the inauguration.

This was not a case of "do as I say and not as I do." When it came to living a full life, Angelou led by example. "To read through Maya Angelou's various poem collections is to see her development not only as a poet but as a human being," says Wagner-Martin. By the time of her death in 2014, Angelou had cemented her status as "the people's poet."

In the above quote from "Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou," Angelou made it clear that cultivating joy is integral to a person's happiness, as was helping others. As she said once, "Be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud. ... I've had so many rainbows in my clouds."

But she had no problem putting someone out of her house for making a racist or homophobic joke or comment. "I believe that a negative statement is poison," Angelou told Winfrey in another interview. "And if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over." 

"She created these maxims or sayings that acknowledged the widely based life she had lived, but she did not dwell on humanity's evils," says Wagner-Martin.

Many quotes have been misattributed to Maya Angelou, perhaps as a sign of her popularity. In 2015, a commemorative stamp for the author featured the quote, "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song," which was really from a poem by children's book author Joan Walsh Anglund.

Another common Angelou misattribution is, "People may forget what you said — but they'll never forget how you made them feel." Carl W. Buehner, an official in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, should get the credit.  

The quote, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you," was originally said by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston.

And although Angelou often remarked, "Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently," she did not originate it. It was Winston Churchill, streamlining a quote from Samuel Johnson.