Quotes from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Sheryl Sandberg ·  217 pages

Rating: (164.8K votes)


“What would you do if you weren't afraid?”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence."
(Harvard Business School definition of leadership)”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead



“There is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Women need to shift from thinking "I'm not ready to do that" to thinking "I want to do that- and I'll learn by doing it.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Fortune does favor the bold and you'll never know what you're capable of if you don't try.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead



“I hope you find true meaning, contentment, and passion in your life. I hope you navigate the difficult times and come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope you find whatever balance you seek with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you - yes, you - have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“I have never met a woman, or man, who stated emphatically, "Yes, I have it all.'" Because no matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead



“She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can't seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who they really are- impostors with limited skills or abilities.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," which instructs young women that if they just wait for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead



“we compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don't expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don't.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“The promise of equality is not the same as true equality.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead



“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, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby,”
― Sheryl Sandberg, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“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, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


“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, quote from Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead


Video

About the author

Sheryl Sandberg
Born place: in Washington, D.C., The United States
Born date August 28, 1969
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“When I asked Marine Sergeant Jeffrey Roberts what he thought was happening in Lebanon, he explained, “To me it was a civil war, only it wasn’t just the North against the South. It was North against South, East against West, Northeast against Southwest, Southeast against Northwest, and we were in the middle of it all. There were just too many different sides. If we picked one, we had four others against us.” Marine”
― quote from From Beirut to Jerusalem


“This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.”
― Steven Johnson, quote from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World


“When I turned 16, I began to confide in the man who had cut my hair since I was 9, the stylist Fran Rich had recommended. Rick Eichhorn became my closest friend for several years. I think one of the reasons I appreciated Rick was that he never once mentioned anything about my skin or my scrawny build. He was just a friend. I felt very comfortable hanging out with him and talking with him about anything. I didn’t have to hide from him. Rick was my best friend at a time when I really needed someone to confide in.”
― Kirk Cameron, quote from Still Growing: An Autobiography


“Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.”
― Tony Horwitz, quote from Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War


“Well, ain't that just the way of the world. Everything come to an end, whether you wants it to or not. All that nature out there: over. The Snare: dead and gone. Even a love that make a man giddy and romantic, that give him a hope and joy he never known, that brave him into taking a slingshot to the impossible and bringing it almost complete to its knees -- even a love like that come to an end. Life just ashes to ashes and dust to dust. And there is nothing you can do about it neither. (Homan)”
― Rachel Simon, quote from The Story of Beautiful Girl


Interesting books

Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate
(4.4K)
Respectable Sins: Co...
by Jerry Bridges
The Gentle Spirit
(3.5K)
The Gentle Spirit
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A Beautiful Evil
(6.5K)
A Beautiful Evil
by Kelly Keaton
JPod
(15.8K)
JPod
by Douglas Coupland
Endure
(17.3K)
Endure
by Carrie Jones
Promise of Blood
(28.2K)
Promise of Blood
by Brian McClellan

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.