Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “These were children, asking not just why but why so often?”

— Michelle Obama

452. “There’s nothing easy about finding your way through a world loaded with obstacles that others can’t or don’t see. When you are different, you can feel as if you’re operating with a different map, a different set of navigational challenges, than those around you. Sometimes, you feel like you have no map at all. Your differentness will often precede you into a room; people see it before they see you. Which leaves you with the task of overcoming.”

— Michelle Obama

453. “No one person, no one relationship, will fulfill your every need. Not every friend can offer you safety or support on every day. Not everyone can, or will, show up precisely when or how you need them to. And this is why it’s good to always continue making room at your table, to keep yourself open to gathering more friends. You will never not need them, and you will never stop learning from them.”

— Michelle Obama

454. “You’ve leaped but you haven’t landed. You can’t know yet how the future’s going to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl.”

— Michelle Obama

455. “Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands being bold.”

— Michelle Obama

456. “Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.”

— Michelle Obama

457. “Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.”

— Michelle Obama

458. “What I won’t allow myself to do, though, is to become cynical. In my most worried moments, I take a breath and remind myself of the dignity and decency I’ve seen in people throughout my life, the many obstacles that have already been overcome. I hope others will do the same.”

— Michelle Obama

459. “He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good.”

— Michelle Obama

460. “The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke.”

— Michelle Obama

461. “When we allow ourselves to celebrate tiny victories as important and meaningful, we start to understand the incremental nature of change – how one vote can help change our democracy; how raising a child who is whole and loved can help change a nation; how educating one girl can change a whole village for the better.”

— Michelle Obama

462. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

463. “We only hurt ourselves when we hide our realness away.”

— Michelle Obama

464. “My mother was a force. She had little tolerance for fools, she kept her hair short and wore practical non-fussy clothes. Everything about her radiated confidence and calm.”

— Michelle Obama

465. “When Barack was first elected, various commentators had naively declared that our country was entering a “postracial” era, in which skin color would no longer matter. Here was proof of how wrong they’d been. As Americans obsessed over the threat of terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and tribalism that were tearing our nation apart.”

— Michelle Obama

466. “Im not loud, I just have a lot to say.”

— Michelle Obama

467. “It was the very thing I’d had to create room for in our shared life, to coexist with, even if reluctantly. It aggravated me sometimes no end, but it was also what I could never disavow in Barack.”

— Michelle Obama

468. “He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions. For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.”

— Michelle Obama

469. “If you tap into your true story, and share that truth, it resonates with people.”

— Michelle Obama

470. “Which is another important thing to remember about friendship: You’re crazy if you think you get to make all the rules. What mattered was that we just kept showing up, in closeness, in commitment, in compromise, and even in fatigue. For me, it’s all about showing up.”

— Michelle Obama

471. “The thick-skin part means learning what to do with your rage and your hurt, where to put it, how to convert it into actual power.”

— Michelle Obama

472. “As Barack’s adviser, I was meant to act as a social conduit more than anything. My assignment was to make sure he was happy in the job, that he had someone to come to if he needed advice, and that he felt connected to the larger team.”

— Michelle Obama

473. “When someone chooses to lift the curtain on a perceived imperfection in her story, on a circumstance or condition that traditionally might be considered to be a weakness, what she’s often actually revealing is the source code for her steadiness and strength.”

— Michelle Obama

474. “She tells me that it’s important to always presume the best about children – that it’s preferable to let them live up to your expectations and high regard rather than asking them to live down to your doubts and worries.”

— Michelle Obama

475. “She’d quietly supported every choice I’d ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit her turn signal to get us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first and worry about your happiness later.”

— Michelle Obama

476. “I hadn’t believed it was possible, but maybe now I did. This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for you. I had fifteen thousand more reasons to want Barack to win.”

— Michelle Obama

477. “There’s something innately bolstering about a person who sees his opportunities as endless, who doesn’t waste time or energy questioning whether they will ever dry up.”

— Michelle Obama

478. “Because here’s the thing: Emotions are not plans. They don’t solve problems or right any wrongs. You can feel them – you will feel them, inevitably – but be careful about letting them guide you. Rage can be a dirty windshield. Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. Disappointment will only ride, sulking and unhelpful, in the back seat. If you don’t do something constructive with them, they’ll take you straight into a ditch. My power has always hinged on my ability to keep myself out of the ditch.”

— Michelle Obama

479. “I often say that it’s much harder to hate up close.”

— Michelle Obama

480. “How do we get more comfortable, less paralyzed, inside of uncertainty? What tools do we have to sustain ourselves? Where do we find extra pillars of support? How can we create safety and stability for others? And if we work as one, what might we manage to overcome together?”

— Michelle Obama

481. “I’ve progressed only slowly to where I am today. If you are a young person reading this, please remember to be patient with yourself. You are at the beginning of a long and interesting journey, one that will not always be comfortable. You will spend years gathering data about who you are and how you operate and only slowly will you find your way towards more certainty and a stronger sense of self. Only gradually will you begin to discover and use your light!”

— Michelle Obama

482. “For now, though, I want to offer one small reminder, which is that real growth begins with how gladly you’re able to see yourself.”

— Michelle Obama

483. “Our hurts become our fears. Our fears become our limits. For many of us, this can be a heavy inheritance, carried by generations. It’s a lot to try to push back against, to try to unlearn.”

— Michelle Obama

484. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

485. “And for me, there is no quicker or more efficient way to obliterate stress and get focused on the present moment than to throw myself into a hard-core, edge-pushing workout. Or even better, a series of them. I guess you might say that vigor is one of my Love Languages.”

— Michelle Obama

486. “It turns out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant. Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward.”

— Michelle Obama

487. “Real-world connections most often tend to cut against stereotypes. They can be remarkably calming, in fact – a small but potent way to reset a bad mood or challenge broader feelings of mistrust. The only thing is that in order to get there, you do first need to lay down your shield.”

— Michelle Obama

488. “Going high is about learning to keep the poison out and the power in.”

— Michelle Obama

489. “I’d known just enough loss by then to know that there was more coming.”

— Michelle Obama

490. “I endured misery for the sake of appearances.”

— Michelle Obama

491. “The goal, instead, is to find someone who will do the work with you, not for you, contributing on all fronts and in all ways.”

— Michelle Obama

492. “Barack, I knew, wrestled with what he wanted to do with his life, which direction his career would take. He had an uneasy relationship with wealth. Like me, he’d never had it, and he didn’t aspire to it, either. He wanted to be effective far more than he wanted to be rich but was still trying to figure out how.”

— Michelle Obama

493. “Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward.”

— Michelle Obama

494. “I will always wonder about what led so many women in particular to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. The result was now ours to live with.”

— Michelle Obama

495. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

496. “I didn’t want the details: I just wanted to know how to feel.”

— Michelle Obama