Bold

You're gonna fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the number of times you get back up.

Stay obsessed. That thing you can't stop thinking about? Keep indulging it. Obsession is the better part of success. You will be great at the things that you can't not do.

Do one thing every day that scares you, and in the process, become the action hero of your own life.

If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life's hard classes. Keep your conclusions light and your curiosity ferocious. Keep groping in the darkness with ravenous desire.

Your career as human beings and as Americans and as graduates of Yale is to stand on the fulcrum between fear and faith—fear at your back, faith in front of you. Which way will you lean? Which way will you move? Move forward. Ever forward.

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation, and we must strive to make equality in education a reality, not just a theory.

Sign languages in schools for the deaf are not only options but they're the human right of deaf children and students, and it is on par with spoken languages.

That is the story of Spelman College — that unyielding presumption of promise, that presumption of brilliance, that presumption that every woman who enrolls at this school has something infinitely valuable to offer this world. And ladies, that is now your story. That legacy is now your inheritance.

Every defeat to me was a challenge. And for six generations, that is what Spelman women have done. They have seen every defeat as a challenge.

Do not leave before you leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision.