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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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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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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Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.
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If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. (5 November 1958)
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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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No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. (20 December 1939)
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I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
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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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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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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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It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.12 (15 June 1946)
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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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Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
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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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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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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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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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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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The giving of love is an education in itself.