All Quotes

"She has become, now a legend," he said...Miss Angelou has a presence that commands attention. Haley called it "Hollywood energy. "When she walks into the room, you know she's there," Haley said. "It's a palpable thing."

"This night she breathes life into works of Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Richard Wright and Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as poems of her own. But it is her voice, as much as the words, that engages the crowd. Burnished and full, the voice is a theatrical blend of city sass and back-country molasses."

"Most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. Oprah Winfrey comes to mind, as do Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Read the life history of any visionary, and you will find insights and passions that came from having dealt with devastation."

"The day I received a hand written note from Maya Angelou, stating that she had read The Margarita Poems and I should consider her another Margarita, was a private moment of recognition."

"Singer, teacher, dancer, poet, authoress, actress, editor, songwriter, playwright. Someone has said Maya Angelou's career has touched more bases than Henry Aaron. Yet all these categories fail to do justice to the scope of her life."

"It is such a profound honor — truly a profound honor — to be here today on behalf of myself and my husband as we celebrate one of the greatest spirits our world has ever known, our dear friend Dr. Maya Angelou. In the Book of Psalms it reads, “I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are your works, my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” What a perfect description of Maya Angelou and the gift she gave to her family and all who loved her. She taught us that we are each wonderfully made, intricately woven and put on this earth for purpose far greater than we could ever imagine. When I think about Maya Angelou I think about the affirming power of her words. The first time I read “Phenomenal Woman” I was struck by how she celebrated black women’s beauty like no one had ever dared to before. Our curves, our stride, our strength, our grace. Her words were clever, and sassy. They were powerful and sexual and boastful. And in that one singular poem, Maya Angelou spoke to the essence of black women but she also graced us with an anthem for all women, a call for all of us to embrace our God-given beauty. And oh, how desperately black girls needed that message. As a young woman I needed that message. As a child, my first doll was Malibu Barbie — that was the standard for perfection. That was what the world told me to aspire to. But then I discovered Maya Angelou, and her words lifted me right out of my own little head. Her message was very simple: She told us that our worth has nothing to do with what the world might say. Instead she said, “Each of us comes from the creator trailing wisps of glory.” She reminded us that we must each find our own voice, decide our own value, and then announce it to the world with all the pride and joy that is our birthright as members of the human race...at a time when there were such stifling constraints on how black women could exist in the world, she serenely disregarded all the rules with fiercely passionate, unapologetic self. She was comfortable in every inch of her glorious brown skin. But for Dr. Angelou her own transition was never enough. You see, she didn’t just want to be phenomenal herself. She wanted us all to be phenomenal right alongside her. So that’s what she did throughout her lifetime. She gathered so many of us under her wing...in so many ways Maya Angelou knew us. She knew our hope, our pain, our ambition, our fear, our anger, our shame. And she assured us that in spite of it all — in fact, because of it all — we were good. And in doing so, she paved the way for me, and Oprah and so many others just to be our good ol’ black women selves. She showed us that eventually, if we stayed true to who we are, then the world would embrace us. And she did this not just for black women but for all women. For all human beings. She taught us all that it is okay to be your regular old self, whatever that is. Your poor self, your broken self, your brilliant, bold, phenomenal self. That was Maya Angelou’s reach."

""Gratitude Pillow" ("Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel" -Maya Angelou) ...if anyone told her they were going/to Gloomy Street,/she'd say, What? Lift those eyes. Take a look at the/sea to your right, buildings full of mysteries, schools/crackling with joy, open porches,/watch the world whirl by,/all we are given without having to own, and shake/that gloom right out of your system!"

"I am a woman phenomenally"

"Many people wonder where my secret lies, I'm not cute a bill to suit a fashion model size, when i tell them they think I'm telling lies"

"I walk into a room just as cool as you please, then to a man, they stand or fall on their knees, then they swam around me a hive of honey bees"

"We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated."

"To not be reduced by the events of our lives means to rise above them"

""One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest"."

"I may say this is a deluded generation, veiled with ignorance, that tho popery and slavery be riding in upon them, do not perceive it; tho I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him."

"They gave us the language but it is only we who know how to use it"

"This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration."

"For what is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with vile envy, a man seeks to beg pardon for his excellences and merits from those who have none? For whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest."

"It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that distinguishes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further."

"Obit anus, abit onus."

"The New Testament … must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism, and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian. It is its morality which places it in a position of such emphatic and essential antagonism to the Old Testament, so that the story of the Fall is the only possible point of connection between the two."

"Think of the fanaticism, the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no conception! Think of the crusades, a butchery lasting two hundred years and inexcusable, its war cry “It is the will of God,” its object to gain possession of the grave of one who preached love and sufferance; think of the cruel expul- sion and extermination of the Moors and Jews from Spain! Think of the orgies of blood, the inquisitions, the heretical tribunals, the bloody and terrible conquests of the Moham- medans in three continents, or those of Christianity in America, whose inhabitants were for the most part, and in Cuba entirely exterminated.”” ...‘“‘Perhaps I go too far in saying all religions. For the sake of truth, I must add that the fanatical enormities perpetrated in the name of religion are only to be put down to the adherents of monotheistic creeds, that is, the Jewish faith and its two branches, Christianity and Islamism. We hear of nothing of the kind in the case of Hindoos and Buddhists.”"

"In an essay on ‘“The Christian System,” he argued that the visions of the Old and New Testament are so unalike that the latter “‘must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian.”"

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."

"When the Church says that, in the dogmas of religion, reason is totally incompetent and blind, and its use to be reprehended, this really attests the fact that these dogmas are allegorical in their nature, and are not to be judged by the standard which reason, taking all things sensu proprio, can alone apply. Now the absurdities of a dogma are just the mark and sign of what is allegorical and mythical in it. In the case under consideration, however, the absurdities spring from the fact that two such heterogeneous doctrines as those of the Old and New Testaments had to be combined. The great allegory was of gradual growth. Suggested by external and adventitious circumstances, it was developed by the interpretation put upon them, an interpretation in quiet touch with certain deep-lying truths only half realised. The allegory was finally completed by Augustine, who penetrated deepest into its meaning, and so was able to conceive it as a systematic whole and supply its defects."

"The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist."

"The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrines in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as absurdities form an essential part of these doctrines we have the great mischief of a continual fraud. Nay, what is worse, the day arrives when they are no longer true sensu proprio, and then there is an end of them; so that, in that respect, it would be better to admit their allegorical nature at once. But the difficulty is to teach the multitude that something can be both true and untrue at the same time. Since all religions are in a greater or less degree of this nature, we must recognise the fact that mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity, that absurdity is an element in its existence, and illusion indispensable; as indeed other aspects of life testify."

"If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man’s property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity."

"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal."

"Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better."

"How every line is of such strong, determined, and consistent meaning! And on every page we encounter deep, original, lofty thoughts, while the whole world is suffused with a high and holy seriousness."

"Just as ivy in search of support entwines itself around a thick prop, adjusts itself to its contours and exactly follows its shape, though it retains its own life and its particular charms, and looks most attractive, so Christian doctrine issuing from the wisdom of India has covered over the old trunk of gross Judaism, which is completely dissimilar to itself. What has been preserved of the fundamental form of the latter is something entirely different, something true and living which has been transformed by this doctrine. The trunk looks the same but is quite different. The Creator outside the world, which he has made out of nothing, is identified with the Saviour and through him with mankind; he is mankind's representative, it was redeemed by him as it had been lost in Adam, since when it has been enchained by the bonds of sin, corruption, suffering and death. For this is the attitude of Christianity as it is of Buddhism. The world can no longer be seen in the light of Jewish optimism which found that "all is well". No, rather is it the devil who now calls himself "prince of this world".... "We may hope", he wrote, "that Europe will free itself some day of all Jewish mythology. Perhaps the century is approaching when the peoples of Japhetic stock, originating in Asia, will find the sacred relics of their native land, because, after going astray for so long, they have reached sufficient maturity for this.""

"And O! how the mind is here washed clean of all its early ingrafted Jewish superstition ! It is the most profitable and elevating reading which is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death."

"The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better prepared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas, the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century: if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the sacred, ancient Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for, if it does not sound too vain, I might express the opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart, though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case."

"And now that I have allowed myself the jest to which in this two-sided life hardly any page can be too serious to grant a place, I part with the book with deep seriousness, in the sure hope that sooner or later it will reach those to whom alone it can be addressed; and for the rest, patiently resigned that the same fate should, in full measure, befall it, that in all ages has, to some extent, befallen all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial. The former fate is also wont to befall its author. But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth."

"Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word."

"The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence."

"This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be."

"The method of viewing things which proceeds in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason is the rational method, and it alone is valid and of use in practical life and in science. The method which looks away from the content of this principle is the method of genius, which is only valid and of use in art."

"Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations."

"Correct and accurate conclusions may be arrived at if we carefully observe the relation of the spheres of concepts, and only conclude that one sphere is contained in a third sphere, when we have clearly seen that this first sphere is contained in a second, which in its turn is contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of sophistry lies in casting only a superficial glance at the relations of the spheres of the concepts, and then manipulating these relations to suit our purposes, generally in the following way: — When the sphere of an observed concept lies partly within that of another concept, and partly within a third altogether different sphere, we treat it as if it lay entirely within the one or the other, as may suit our purpose."

"Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received. Of itself it has nothing but the empty forms of its operation. There is no absolutely pure rational knowledge except the four principles to which I have attributed metalogical truth; the principles of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason of knowledge. For even the rest of logic is not absolutely pure rational knowledge. It presupposes the relations and the combinations of the spheres of concepts. But concepts in general only exist after experience of ideas of perception, and as their whole nature consists in their relation to these, it is clear that they presuppose them."

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see."

"My body and my will are one."

"We see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce forever all the pleasure of life and the aims till then pursued so keenly, or cheerfully and willingly give up life itself."

"That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive."

"There is only one inborn erroneous notion … that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of … disappointment."

"Life is a business that does not cover the costs."

"Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value."

"If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at."

"Elspet Gray - The Queen"