A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

To the people I forgot, you weren’t on my mind for some reason and you probably don’t deserve any thanks anyway.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief… All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

God created man, but I could do better.

I have wondered about time all my life.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

I am rather inclined to silence.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Life is wasted on the living.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Traveling around the world and preaching for over 70 years did not give much time for reflection.