“Lift up your hearts Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings”
– Dr. Maya Angelou from “On the Pulse of Morning” recited at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, January 1993.
Maya Angelou died May 28, 2014, but through her wise and heartfelt words, she lives on. Sometimes, the very simplicity of her message is what moved us, the observations she shared through poetry or prose that could inspire a person toward hope and new beginnings, as she did with “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993. Other times, she made us contemplate what really matters.
If Angelou commanded us to have hope, to have faith, to believe in new chances and new beginnings, we must believe her. She knew what she was talking about. She reinvented herself more than once. Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri on April 4, 1928; she renamed herself Maya Angelou when she toured as a stage actress. By that time, Angelou had been raped at age 7 by her mother’s boyfriend, been shuttled back and forth between Arkansas and California, dropped out of school at 14, and become a teen mother at just 17 years old.
None of what went before kept her from her destiny; in fact, it drove her to live bigger and command greater presense than her 6 ft. tall frame already provided, ultimately becoming a world-renowned poet and author of works such as, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. Angelou was known just as well as an actress (in the mini-series “Roots” for one), a civil rights activist around the world, a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and as a lecturer. There seems no more eloquent way to pay tribute to Angelou than through the very words she leaves us as her legacy. Here are ten gifts from Maya Angelou that we hold dear…
“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
“Nothing will work unless you do.”
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
“Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.”
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
“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.”
“You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.”
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
“A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.”
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