If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creativity is inherent in everyone, but societal pressures often suppress it during childhood.
Maya Angelou's quote highlights the natural creativity that children possess, which can be hindered by societal expectations and constraints. As children grow, the encouragement to conform often stifles their imaginative expressions, leading to a loss of this intrinsic ability as they strive to fit in with others.
Themes
CreativityChildrenImaginationSocietyExpression
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about education, to emphasize the importance of fostering children's creativity.
More from Maya Angelou
All quotes βI 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 AngelouRead
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.
Maya AngelouRead
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?
Maya AngelouRead
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.
Maya AngelouRead
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.
Maya AngelouRead
Similar quotes
As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.
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We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it's creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.
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Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya LinRead
Creativity has two possibilities. One is that it arises out of your silence, love, understanding, your clarity of vision, your intimate friendliness with existence - then creativity is healthy. But if it does not arise out of meditation, out of silence and peace and understanding and love, then there is a danger. It may be arising out of your confused mind. It may be arising out of your insanity.
RajneeshRead
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
Lewis HydeRead