Top 250 Sheryl Sandberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We call our little girls bossy. Go to a playground; little girls get called bossy all the time – a word that’s almost never used for boys – and that leads directly to the problems women face in the workforce.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

102. “The best decision I ever made was to marry Dave.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

103. “I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work with, all these fabulous women, ‘Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.’ I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it’s not that simple.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

104. “Everyone knows that marriage is the biggest personal decision you make, but it’s the biggest career decision you can make.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

105. “And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman’s self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

106. “Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. It comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning in to the suck. It comes from analyzing how we process grief and from simply accepting that grief. Sometimes we have less control than we think. Other times we have more. I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

107. “It’s pretty exciting to take real people living in the real world, their opinions, and have people have to react to that. As opposed to their perceptions of what people are thinking, which are often very different.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

108. “But I really believe that when you give people authentic identity, which is what Facebook does, and you can be your real self and connect with real people online, things will change.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

109. “I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

110. “We need to talk more openly about mentorships and sponsorships. Women don’t get the mentoring, and particularly the sponsors, they need to succeed as much as men.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

111. “We know when we use the full talents of our population we’re more productive. And we know that when people really feel like they can have flexible lives, they’re better employees.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

112. “We’re focused on doing one thing incredibly well. If you look at other companies, all of these companies are doing a lot of different things but we’re still, as we grow, doing exactly one thing.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

113. “When the man is traveling with a man, he says, “Let’s stay up late and work on this and get this to be better.” When the man’s traveling with the woman, for the sake of appearances he doesn’t do the work with her. That’s a lost opportunity for her to be a success.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

114. “I go around the room and ask people, ‘What do you think?’”

— Sheryl Sandberg

115. “Pages on Facebook are allowed to be anonymous. That is really important. People start revolutions; we need anonymity.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

116. “We’ve ceased making progress at the top in any industry anywhere in the world. In the United States, women have had 14% of the top corporate jobs and 17% of the board seats for 10 years. Ten years of no progress.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

117. “Women systematically underestimate their own abilities.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

118. “Coming from Google, you don’t exactly spend a lot of time at Microsoft.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

119. “You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it’s easy. I work long hours.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

120. “When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated, and ambitious.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

121. “Over the last 10 years, women have stalled out at the top.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

122. “The most important thing we’re doing differently is that we talk openly about gender at Facebook.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

123. “The more women help one another, the more we help ourselves. Acting like a coalition truly does produce results. Any coalition of support must also include men, many of whom care about gender inequality as much as women do.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

124. “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, thirteen per cent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top – C-level jobs, board seats – tops out at fifteen, sixteen per cent.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

125. “The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

126. “Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

127. “The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be you. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

128. “One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others. The information is revealing and potentially uncomfortable, which is why all of us would rather offer feedback to those who welcome it.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

129. “Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

130. “Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

131. “We find our humanity – our will to live and our ability to love – in our connections to one another.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

132. “Done is better than perfect.” I have tried to embrace this motto and let go of unattainable standards. Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

133. “What is your biggest problem, and how can I solve it?”

— Sheryl Sandberg

134. “I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

135. “Less than six months after I started at Facebook, Mark and I sat down for my first formal review. One of the things he told me was that my desire to be liked by everyone would hold me back. He said that when you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress. Mark was right.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

136. “Give us a world where half our homes are run by men, and half our institutions are run by women. I’m pretty sure that would be a better world.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

137. “Until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not gong to achieve as much as men.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

138. “As Allen Rucker wrote about his paralysis, “I won’t make your skin crawl by saying it’s a ‘blessing in disguise.’ It’s not a blessing and there is no disguise. But there are things to be gained and things to be lost, and on certain days, I’m not sure that the gains are not as great as, or even greater than, the inevitable losses.” Tragedy.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

139. “Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

140. “It takes a near act of rebellion for even a four-year-old to break away from society’s expectations.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

141. “From the moment we are born, boys and girls are treated differently. Parents tend to talk to girl babies more than boy babies. Mothers overestimate the crawling ability of their sons and underestimate the crawling ability of their daughters. Reflecting the belief that girls need to be helped more than boys, mothers often spend more time comforting and hugging infant girls and more time watching infant boys play by themselves.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

142. “My hope in writing ‘Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead’ was to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what we can.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

143. “Even when we’re in great distress, joy can still be found in moments we seize and moments we create. Cooking. Dancing. Hiking. Praying. Driving. Singing Billy Joel songs off-key. All of these can provide relief from pain. And when these moments add up, we find that they give us more than happiness; they also give us strength.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

144. “The birth of a child instantly changes how we define ourselves. Women become mothers. Men become fathers. Couples become parents. Our priorities shift in fundamental ways. Parenting may be the most rewarding experience, but it is also the hardest and most humbling.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

145. “As former secretary of state Madeleine Albright once said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

146. “Not only do we learn more from failure than success, we learn more from bigger failures because we scrutinize them more closely.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

147. “In fact, my New Year’s resolution every year, and I’m Jewish so I get two New Years a year, is to meditate, and I fail every time.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

148. “I’m not telling women to be like men. I’m telling us to evaluate what men and women do in the workforce and at home without the gender bias.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

149. “Facebook is a really exciting place trying to do something really important that I really believe in. And it matters.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

150. “Wanting to improve is not a sign of weakness.”

— Sheryl Sandberg