Michelle Obama

Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.

I will always be engaged in some way in public service and public life. The minute I left my corporate-law firm to work for the city, I never looked back. I’ve always felt very alive using my gifts and talents to help other people. I sleep better at night. I’m happier.

I was the most productive when I was in a flex situation. Do not check for me for needless meetings.

When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.

I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.

Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.

Husbands and wives, first be faithful to each other. Second, keep the romance going all of your life by courting each other every day.

Many people spend more time in planning the wedding than they do in planning the marriage.

It was a very meaningful ceremony and marriage means a lot to me.

My last divorce was in ’68. What made it come to a head was a promise. See, I had promised her that the next year I wouldn’t work as much. But then I got in trouble with the IRS, and I had to continue working just as much to pay the government. So she said I lied, which is something I never did.

If you were going to list the 100 most popular things that I have done as president. Being married to Michelle Obama is number one.

I am a black American male from Chicago, who had my rehearsal dinner at Versailles and then got married in Florence with a view of the entire city.

Husbands and wives, have fun with each other. I’m convinced it makes all the difference in the world.

Michelle’s like Beyoncé in that song ‘Let me upgrade ya!’ She upgraded me.

This is my first marriage. Beforehand, I was living in sin.

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.