If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that many individuals maintain virtue due to limited opportunities for misbehavior.
Maya Angelou's quote reflects on the nature of virtue in relation to opportunity. It implies that the choices and morals of individuals, particularly 'plain girls' in this context, may be influenced more by their circumstances than by intrinsic qualities. When opportunities for alternative behaviors are scarce, virtue may not be as much of a choice as it is a necessity, suggesting a commentary on social conditions and personal agency.
Themes
VirtueOpportunityChoiceMoralSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about morality and choices during a sociology class.
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
At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?
Alain De BottonRead
I have no influence with the rising generation. All my arguments have failed to induce them to set bounds to their wants.
Benjamin BannekerRead
I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.
Lu XunRead
[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.
Helen FisherRead
Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
Bonnie Jo CampbellRead
Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead