If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine. Clean. So that nobody has a right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody. No mother, father, no wife, no husband, no-nobody. You have to have a place where you say: 'Stop it. Back up. Don't you know I'm a child of God?
Interpretation
Establish a sacred inner space that protects your self-worth from negativity and malice.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining an inner sanctuary that remains untouched by external negativity, regardless of who it comes from. Maya Angelou encourages individuals to recognize their inherent value and to assert boundaries so that they can protect their self-esteem and dignity against harmful treatment from others.
In practice
In a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of self-respect.
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.
When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
Which only goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words,' Dumbledore went on, smiling.
Not to converse with a man worthy of conversation is to waste the man. To converse with a man not worthy of conversation is to waste words. The wise waste neither men nor words.
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.
Be mindful of the words that you use and the actions that you live and who you are and how it is you use your power. Keep clear at all times that you are what you say you are.
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