Maya Angelou Quotes About Responsibility

• When we decide to be happy we accept the responsibility to bring happiness to someone else. Some decide that happiness and glee are the same thing, they are not. When we choose happiness we accept the responsibility to lighten the load of someone else and to be a light on the path to another who may be walking in darkness.

  Maya Angelou

  Motivational, Responsibility, Light

  FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Mar 20, 2014

• I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Life, Spiritual

  Twitter post from Mar 03, 2017

• It is important that we learn humility, which says there was someone else before me who paid for me. My responsibility is to prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who is yet to come.

  Maya Angelou

  Humility, Responsibility, Important

  FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Feb 05, 2013

• I not only have the right to stand up for myself, but I have the responsibility. I can't ask somebody else to stand up for me if I won't stand up for myself. And once you stand up for yourself, you'd be surprised that people say, "Can I be of help?".

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, People, Helping

  Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.oprah.com. December 2000.

• What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.

  Maya Angelou

  Positive, Responsibility, Space

• When we decide to be happy we accept the responsibility to bring happiness to someone else.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspiring, Responsibility, Accepting

  Twitter post from Mar 20, 2014

• And I not only have the right to stand up for myself, but I have the responsibility. I can't ask somebody else to stand up for me if I won't stand up for myself. And once you stand up for yourself, you'd be surprised that people say, "Can I be of help?"

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, People, Helping

• I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.

  Maya Angelou

  Life, God, Responsibility

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.94, Modern Library

• Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.

  Maya Angelou

  Lying, Responsibility, Choices

  Maya Angelou (2014). “Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou”, p.73, Random House

• When it looks like the sun isn't going to shine any more, God puts a rainbow in the clouds. Each one of us has the possibility, the responsibility, the probability to be the rainbow in the clouds.

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, Clouds, Rainbow

• Among other things, I'm thinking "I'm a child of God." That's amazing. And "I'm not only a child of God, but God loves me." The hardest part for me is to realize that while God loves me, and I am a child of God, I have to see the bigot and the brute and the rapist, and whether he or she knows it or not, I have to know that that person is a child of God. That is part of the responsibility - and it's hard.

  Maya Angelou

  Children, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: www.oprah.com

• Each child belongs to all of us and they will bring us a tomorrow in direct relation to the responsibility we have shown to them.

  Maya Angelou

  Children, Responsibility, Tomorrow

  FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Jun 29, 2010

• I try to live what I consider a "poetic existence." That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.

  Maya Angelou

  Appreciation, Mean, Responsibility

  Maya Angelou, Jeffrey M. Elliot (1989). “Conversations with Maya Angelou”

• What I think it really means is: I'm a teacher. I am a teacher. I teach all the time, as you do and as all of you do-whether we know it or not, whether we take responsibility for it or not. I hold nothing back because I want to see that light go off. I like to see the children say, 'I never thought of that before.' And I think, 'I've got them!'

  Maya Angelou

  Teacher, Children, Mean

• Each of us has a responsibility for being alive: one responsibility to creation, of which we are a part, another to the creator a debt we repay by trying to extend our areas of comprehension.

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, Trying, Debt

• Each of us has the power and responsibility to become a rainbow in the clouds.

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, Clouds, Rainbow

• Joy is a freedom. It helps a person to find his/her own liberation. The person who is joyous takes responsibility for the time he/she takes up and the space that he/she occupies. You share it! Some of you have it ... you share it! That is what joy is! When you continue to give it away you will still have so much more of it.

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, Space, Giving

  Beautifully Said Magazine Interview, beautifullysmagazine.com.

• "Baby, you know?" my mother once said to me. "I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met - and I'm not including my mother or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in that." She said, "You are very intelligent and you're very kind, and those two qualities do not often go together." Then she went across the street and got in her car, and I went the other way down to the streetcar. I thought, "Suppose she's right. She's intelligent - and she's too mean to lie." You see, a parent has the chance - and maybe the responsibility - to liberate her child. And my mom had liberated me when I was 17.

  Maya Angelou

  Mom, Mother, Baby

  Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.oprah.com. December 2000.

• Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the 'leaders' must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspiring, Dream, Responsibility

  "Visions: Maya Angelou". Interview With Ken Kelley, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1995.

• I'm a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I'm even afraid of it - it's a learned affectation and it's just stuck on me like decals.

  Maya Angelou

  Religious, Responsibility, Modesty

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• I made the decision to quit show business. Give up the skintight dresses and manicured smiles. The false concern over sentimental lyrics. I would never again work to make people smile inanely and would take on the responsibility of making them think.

  Maya Angelou

  Giving Up, Responsibility, Thinking

  Dr. Maya Angelou (2009). “The Heart of a Woman”, p.55, Random House

• I'm a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I'm even afraid of it - it's a learned affectation and it's just stuck on me like decals. Now I pray for humility because that comes from inside out.

  Maya Angelou

  Religious, Humility, Responsibility

  Interview With Marianne Schnall, www.psychologytoday.com. February 17, 2009.

• I do hope that young men and women will start to think for themselves and start to take responsibility for their own thoughts.

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, Men, Thinking

  "America's Renaissance Woman". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. January 22, 1997.

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