Michelle Obama

Success isn’t about how your life looks to others. It’s about how it feels to you. We realized that being successful isn’t about being impressive, it’s about being inspired. That’s what it means to be true to yourself.

My daughters are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Tweeting and social media – that is a powerful weapon that we just hand over to little kids. You know, a ten-year-old. Yo, tell it like it is. And it’s like, no you don’t. You need to think and spell it right and have good grammar.

Oftentimes, it’s the way we react to change that is the thing that determines the overall experience.

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

So early in our lives we are shushed. And not just directly shushed but sometimes in our lives we’re treated too preciously. We may have a father that loves us and treats us like a doll. They don’t treat us like real beings and equal partners.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

I realized that kids everywhere go for the same stuff; and seeing as we’d done it in England, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it in America too.

Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart: And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time.

When I was a little girl, I remember carrying my orange UNICEF carton with me as I went Trick-or-Treating.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We’d go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I’ve always been a big animal person.

We can aim to create a culture, where kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

You don’t want to be with a boy who is too stupid to appreciate a smart young lady. There is no boy who is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.

Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.

The idea of kids helping other kids is such a great way to introduce children to being involved in charitable causes and volunteer work, setting them on the path to doing good for others throughout their lives.

Everything depends on upbringing.

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.