Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
-- Maya Angelou
About the Quote
It's not easy to become virtuous or to practice virtue. For example, it's easier to tell a social white lie at a party than it is to tell the host that he can't sing. It's easy to mail in a job than it is to give maximum effort. Although it's easy for a child to do, it's difficult for adults to tell "the emperor" that he has no clothes.
In a world where it's easy to go with the flow, doing the right thing occasionally requires that we go against that flow. That means we need to be strong enough to move in the proper direction as the current goes the other way. This strength is a product of having courage. Even if we're afraid of what will happen if we go against the current, we do it anyway because it's simpy what needs to be done.
Without the virture of courage, the other virtues don't develop.
Some Information about Maya Angelou
Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, US on 1928-April-4. She died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, US on 2014-May-28.
Better known as Maya Angelou, she was a pet, memoirist, and actress.
She was born in St. Louis, but she was raised by her paternal grandmother in the rural town of Stamps, Arkansas, US.
Among Maya Angelou's best-known are volumes from her autobiographical series: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was made into a television movie which aired in 1979.
Her autobiophical series includes themes of various forms of oppression, including economic, racial, and sexual. When she was not even 8 years of age she was raped by her mother's boyfriend (who himself was murdered after that event). The trauma of those events was so much that she was almost unable to speak for a few years.
In 1940, Marguerite Johnson and her mother moved to San Francisco, California, US. While in San Francisco she worked at one time or another as a cocktail waitress, a cook, a prostitute and madam, and a dancer. It was when she was a dancer that she began using the name Maya Angelou.
-- Source
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