Michelle Obama

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where most folks, including my parents, didn’t have college degrees. But with a lot of hard work – and a lot of financial aid – I had the chance to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School, and that gave me the confidence to pursue my ambitions.

Success is only meaningful and enjoyable if it feels like your own.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

When I’m happier and healthier, my family is happier and healthier, and it affects how I interact with my friends and the people I work with.

Failure is an important part of your growth and developing resilience. Don’t be afraid to fail.

I learned in those eight years is that home is where you make it, and we were in the White House for eight years, but it wasn’t the house. It was us in it. It was our value and our love for each other.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

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.

Sometimes if I see negative things it really doesn’t faze me, because you’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to be you.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.