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Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama Quotes

Former First Lady of the United States

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Famous Michelle Obama Quotes

“When you start to rewrite the story of not-mattering, you start to find a new center. You remove yourself from other people’s mirrors and begin speaking more fully from your own experience, your own knowing place. You become better able to attach to your pride and more readily step over all the despites. It doesn’t remove the obstacles, but I’ve found that it helps to shrink them. It helps you to count your victories, even the small ones, and know that you’re doing okay.”

Confidence
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“I’d been raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go after and get absolutely anything I wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as Suzanne would say, why not? I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything? I had no idea.”

ConfidenceRaisedEverything
Book:Becoming
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“My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate - kind of unflappable Zen neutrality... She wasn't quick to judge and she wasn't quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring... When we'd done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did.”

ConfidenceParentingSelf WorthSelf Actualization
Book:Becoming
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“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.”

Overachievement
Book:Becoming
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“I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? “Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.” This, I was learning, was how Barack’s mind worked. He got himself fixated on big and abstract issues, fueled by some crazy sense that he might be able to do something about them. It was new to me, I have to say. Until now, I’d hung around with good people who cared about important enough things but who were focused primarily on building their careers and providing for their families. Barack was just different. He was dialed into the day-to-day demands of his life, but at the same time, especially at night, his thoughts seemed to roam a much wider plane.”

Big QuestionsMaking A Difference In The WorldBarack Obama
Book:Becoming
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“If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you're right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you'd ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I'd miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn't take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I'd been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.”

Pregnancy Loss
Book:Becoming
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“Iba dándome cuenta de que las partes importantes de mi historia no estaban tanto en el valor superficial de mis éxitos como en lo que subyacía a éstos: las muchas formas discretas en que había ido afianzándome a lo largo de los años, y las personas que habían contribuido a reforzar mi confianza con el paso del tiempo. Me acordaba de todas ellas, de cada persona que me animó a que siguiese adelante, esforzándose por inocular en mí la defensa contra los desprecios y las humillaciones que sin duda recibiría en los sitios hacia los que me encaminaba, todos esos entornos creados principalmente por y para personas que no eran negras y mujeres.”

ConfianzaDiscriminaciónRazaApoyo
Book:Mi historia
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“Especially for girls of color, we're treated as lightning or gold in the pan--we're not treated as things that are going to last," [Amanda Gorman] said. "You really have to crown yourself with the belief that what I'm about and what I'm here for is way beyond this moment. I'm learning that I am not lightning that strikes once. I am the hurricane that comes every single year, and you can expect to see me again soon.”

PowerWomen Of ColorAmanda Gorman
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“AVISO PARA TODOS LOS QUE ENTREN AQUÍ: Si entras en esta habitación con lástima o para sentir lástima por mis heridas, vete a otra parte. Las heridas que sufrí las recibí haciendo un trabajo que adoro, para personas a las que quiero, defendiendo la libertad de un país por el que siento un amor profundo. Soy extraordinariamente duro y me recuperaré por completo. Eso era resiliencia. Era el reflejo de un espíritu de autosuficiencia y orgullo que había visto por todas partes en el ejército.”

Resiliencia
Book:Becoming
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“Nici o persoană și nici o relație nu-ți va satisface toate nevoile. Nu toți prietenii îți pot oferi siguranță sau sprijin în fiecare zi. Nu toată lumea va putea sau va dori să fie alături de tine așa cum sau când ai tu nevoie să o facă. Și acesta este motivul pentru care e bine să faci neîncetat loc la masă, să rămâi deschis pentru a aduna și alți prieteni. Nu se va întâmpla niciodată să nu ai nevoie de ei și niciodată nu vei înceta să înveți de la ei.”

Prieteni
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or a open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you'd otherwise find beautiful - a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”

BecomingMichelle Obama Quotes
Book:Becoming
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“Making a genuine connection with another person does help to counteract all this [loneliness]. And I'm not talking about making Instagram or Facebook "friends" here, but rather one-on-one, face-to-face, IRL relationships. These are what open us to the actual lives of others, not just the filtered and curated existences we're likely to encounter online. In a true friendship, you remove your filters.”

RelationshipsFriendshipLoneliness
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“Finding and maintaining healthy friendships may not always be the easiest undertaking, especially now that a pandemic has made casual interactions more fraught, but the benefits have been well-established. If you have strong social ties, research shows that you are likely to live longer and with less stress. Scientists have linked having a robust social support system to lower rates of depression, anxiety, and heart disease. Even small social interactions--the kind you have while buying a cup of coffee or out walking a dog--have been shown to boost mental health and create stronger ties inside a community.”

FriendshipCommunitySocialization
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“Going high is about learning to keep the poison out and the power in. It means that you have to be judicious with your energy and clear in your convictions. You push ahead in some instances and pull back in others, giving yourself opportunities to rest and restore. It helps to recognize that you are operating on a budget, as all of us are. When it comes to our attention, our time, our credibility, our goodwill toward and from others, we work with a limited but renewable set of resources.”

ActivismDiscernment
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“Going high is something you do rather than merely feel. It’s not some call to be complacent and wait around for change, or to sit on the sidelines as others struggle. It is not about accepting the conditions of oppression or letting cruelty and power go unchallenged. The notion of going high shouldn’t raise any questions about whether we are obligated to fight for more fairness, decency, and justice in this world; rather, it’s about how we fight, how we go about trying to solve the problems we encounter, and how we sustain ourselves long enough to be effective rather than burn out.”

Activism
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“Going high is work—often hard, often tedious, often inconvenient, and often bruising. You will need to disregard the haters and the doubters. You will need to build some walls between yourself and those who would prefer to see you fail. And you will need to keep working when others around you may have grown tired or cynical and given up.”

Activism
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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“When it comes to wanting to make a difference in the world, I find that it can also be useful to break down those gigantic, all-or-nothing goals into their component parts. This way, you are less likely to get overwhelmed or exhausted, or crash into feelings of futility. None of this is defeat. What becomes defeating is when great becomes the enemy of good—when we get so caught up in the hugeness of everything that we stall out before we’ve even started, when the problems appear so big that we give up on taking the smaller steps, managing what is actually in our control.”

ActivismPersistence
Book:The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
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