Michelle Obama

I always sort of felt like the eight years that Barack was president, it was sort of like having the good parent at home. You know, the responsible parent, the one who told you to eat your carrots and go to bed on time.

The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.

If you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

I’ve seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.

If we want maturity, we have to be mature. If we want a nation that feels hopeful, then we have to speak in hopeful terms… We have to model what we want.

Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.

You are a constant. Forever in my mind; forever in my heart. It seems that most matter how much I try I can’t get rid of you. You are a thorn, stuck in deep; painful to remove, and even when I do, still I’ll bleed and feel the soreness. It will take time, but it will heal. No matter the pain, I will still dare to pick roses.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.

This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.

The traveler that resolutely follows a rough and winding path will sooner reach the end of his journey than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hour of daylight in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I’m with you kid. Let’s go.”

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.