Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes
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The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
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You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
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When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
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Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
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We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.
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One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)
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Example is the best lesson there is.
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I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
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Long ago, I made up my mind that when things were said involving only me, I would pay no attention to them, except when valid criticism was carried by which I could profit. (14 January 1942)
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I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
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One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. … All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there's one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.
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Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
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Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be 'damned if you do, and damned if you don't.'
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It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.12 (15 June 1946)
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At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want - for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war. (15 April 1943)
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The arts in every field - music, drama, sculpture, painting - we can learn to appreciate and enjoy. We need not be artists, but we should be able to appreciate the work of artists. (5 November 1958)
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One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable. (11 September 1941)
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You get more joy out of the giving to others, and should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give.
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Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
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I have a great belief in spiritual force, but I think we have to realize that spiritual force alone has to have material force with it so long as we live in a material world. The two together make a strong combination. (17 May 1940)
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Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
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The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.
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To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times - The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.
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The giving of love is an education in itself.