When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her.

People assume Wall Street is a certain culture and tech is a certain culture. But if you look at the (gender) numbers at the top of (those) industries, they don't vary very much. I think in finance, women hold 19 percent of the top jobs, and women are 21 percent of the leaders in nonprofits.

The reason I wrote Lean In is I think people weren't actually noticing that we had stopped making progress. I gave a TED talk and said: "It turns out men still run the world." And the audience gasped as if that was news.

Don't let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face-and there will be barriers-be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you're capable of unless you try.

Both men and women react negatively when women negotiate on their own behalf. A man can just negotiate: "I have a better offer. That's not enough to make my family's ends meet." No one feels bad about it. But when a woman does that, there's a backlash.

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.

I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I'm home for dinner with my kids at 6, and interestingly, I've been doing that since I had kids. I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it's not until the last year, two years, that I'm brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn't lie, but I wasn't running around giving speeches on it." "...there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's work, and there's life, and there's no balance.