30 Quotes from The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

Looking for quotes from The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama? Here are 30 of the best quotes from the former First Lady himself.

In The Light We Carry, Michelle shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly uncertain world. There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux.

Scroll down to read 30 of the best quotes from The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama.

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Quotes from The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

I believe that each of us carries a bit of inner brightness, something entirely unique and individual, a flame that’s worth protecting. When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it. When we learn to foster what’s unique in the people around us, we become better able to build compassionate communities and make meaningful change.
We ourselves are always in motion, in progress. We are perpetually in flux. We keep learning even when we’re tired of learning, changing even when we’re exhausted by change. There are few guaranteed outcomes. Each day we are tasked with becoming some newer version of ourselves.
One light feeds another. One strong family lends strength to more. One engaged community can ignite those around it. This is the power of the light we carry.
I’ve learned it’s okay to recognize that self-worth comes wrapped in vulnerability, and that what we share as humans on this earth is the impulse to strive for better, always and no matter what. We become bolder in brightness. If you know your light, you know yourself. You know your own story in an honest way.
Sometimes you recognize a tool only after it starts working for you. And sometimes, it turns out, the smallest of tools can help us to sort through the largest of feelings.
When you’re beginning something new, you can’t always see where you’re headed with it. You have to be okay with not knowing exactly how things will turn out.
We practice our faith in the smallest of ways. And in practicing it, we remember what’s possible. With it, we are saying I can. We are saying I care. We are not giving up.
Can I afford to make my world a little bigger? I believe the answer is almost always yes.
I’ve been practicing stepping back and addressing my fear with familiarity, offering no more than a half-friendly shrug and a few easy words: Oh, hello. It’s you again. Thanks for showing up. For making me so alert. But I see you. You’re no monster to me.
The unknown is where possibility glitters. If you don’t take the risk, if you don’t ride out a few jolts, you are taking away your opportunities to transform.
Real growth begins with how gladly you’re able to see yourself.
How you view yourself becomes everything. It’s your foundation, the starting point for changing the world around you.
No one can make you feel bad if you feel good about yourself.
Life has shown me that strong friendships are most often the result of strong intentions. Your table needs to be deliberately built, deliberately populated, and deliberately tended to. Not only do you have to say I am curious about you to someone who might be a friend, but you should also invest in that curiosity—setting aside time and energy for your friendship to grow and deepen, privileging it ahead of the things that will pile up and demand your attention in ways that friendship seldom does.
Barack is my best friend, my true love, and my life’s greatest disrupter.
Be trustworthy and tender with your acquaintances and their stories. Keep confidences, resist gossip. Read books by people whose perspective is different from yours, listen to voices you haven’t heard before, look for narratives that are new to you. In them and with them, you might end up finding more room for yourself.
Any time we grip hands with another soul and recognize some piece of the story they’re trying to tell, we are acknowledging and affirming two truths at once: We’re lonely and yet we’re not alone.
There’s no way to eliminate the ache of being human, but I do think we can diminish it. This starts when we challenge ourselves to become less afraid to share, more ready to listen—when the wholeness of your story adds to the wholeness of mine. I see a little of you. You see a little of me. We can’t know all of it, but we’re better off as familiars.
Going high is a commitment, and not a particularly glamorous one, to keep moving forward. It only works when we do the work.
Tell the truth, do your best by others, keep perspective, understand history and context. Stay prudent, stay tough, and stay outraged. But more than anything, don’t forget to do the work.
Every latent dream awakens only when someone is glad for it.
Ingenuity is born of boldness. We have to be able to envision what’s possible, summoning it from the unknown—whatever does not yet exist, the sort of world we hope to live in—in order to even begin to actualize a plan to get there.
A motto stays hollow if we only repeat it and put it on products we can sell on Etsy. We need to embody it, pour ourselves into it—pour our frustration and hurt into it, even. When we lift the barbell, we get our results.
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.
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!
Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands being bold.
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.
A successful partnership is like a winning basketball team made up of two deaf individuals with fully developed and interchangeable sets of skills. Each player has to know not just how to shoot but also how to dribble, pass and defend. That doesn’t mean there aren’t weaknesses or differences you will compensate for in each other. It’s just that together you’ll have to cover the full court keeping yourselves versatile over time.
A partnership doesn’t actually change who you are even as it challenges you to be accommodating of another person’s needs… The change is in what is between us, the million small adjustments, compromises and sacrifices, we’ve each made in order to accommodate the close presence of the other.
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.

Which quote from The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama is your favorite?