If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the paradox of youthful freedom versus the anxiety of uncertainty.
Maya Angelou's quote encapsulates the bittersweet experience of youth, where one feels a profound sense of freedom while simultaneously facing the overwhelming possibilities that can lead to indecision. It suggests that the beauty of life lies in its unpredictability, capturing both the exhilaration of choices and the pain that can accompany the inability to choose a clear path.
In practice
In a graduation speech about embracing uncertainty.
If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
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.
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?
I know that I'm not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don't know how not to.
I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people - one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion's den. You can't just play around with all those big cats - you've got to take somebody on.
We see ourselves in terms of yesterday and today. Our Heavenly Father sees us in terms of forever.
As to the Constitution and the Union, I have taken an oath to support the one, and I cannot do so without preserving the other, unless I commit perjury, which I certainly don't intend to do. We must cherish the Constitution to the last.
How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?
The practice is to make the non-arising of grasping and clinging absolute, final, and eternally void, so that no grasping and clinging can ever return. Just that is enough. There is nothing else to do.
As long as we are among humans, let us be humane.
We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.
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