Sheryl Sandberg Quotes

Build your skills, not your resume.

When people are really suffering, and we know they're suffering, that question can be a very difficult one. Inadvertently, I think without anyone meaning it, it communicates a lack of empathy.

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

We know that the only way to achieve equality is if both men and women want to achieve equality. We also know that equality is not just the right thing to do for men, it is a good thing to do.

We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim.

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 "Seeping 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.

Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.

Your life's course will not be determined by doing the things that you are certain you can do. Those are the easy things. It will be determined by whether you try the things that are hard.

After my husband, Dave, died, I called my friend Adam, a psychologist who studies how people find meaning in our lives, and I asked him what, if anything, I could do to help myself and my kids get through this. We started talking about resilience, then reading about it, then talking to other people who had gotten through grief and other huge challenges. In time, those conversations and that research helped me heal.

I think now is our time. My mother was told by everyone that she had two choices: She could be a nurse or a teacher. The external barriers now are just so much lower. If we start acknowledging what the real issues are, we can solve them. It's not that hard.

The things that hold women back, hold them back from sitting at the boardroom table and they hold women back from speaking at the PTA meeting.

Fortune does favor the bold and you'll never know what you're capable of if you don't try.

A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.

Women don't take enough risks. Men are just 'foot on the gas pedal.' We're not going to close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.

You need to feel that you're making a difference.

At Facebook we feel a lot of affinity not just for this community but for any community that is trying to do what Davos is trying to do, which is to share information. And Davos is doing it in a particular way - I think the Facebook approach is obviously more broad-based, we're trying to include everyone in the world. But the goal is the same: bring people together, to share information and make the world more connected, and have people have a deeper understanding of themselves, others, the communities of which they want to be a part and can be a part.

I know from my own experience that the path to change is best traveled when we travel together.