Eleanor Roosevelt Quotations

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

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.

A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.

What you don't do can be a destructive force.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.

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 should be curiosity.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.

Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation.

I'm so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.

Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me 'understand' something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

What one has to do usually can be done.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours - and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

The mother of a family should look upon her housekeeping and the planning of meals as a scientific occupation.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

I do not think that I am a natural born mother... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.

No, I don't. Well, I mean, she's here, she's a presence, but we haven't been able to have a conversation.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by doing the thing which you think you cannot do.

Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’

To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.

We must want for others, not ourselves alone.

Franklin's illness...gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons - infinite patience and never ending persistence.

Do something everyday that scares you,

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person's stature is as large as one's own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil.

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations.

I believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but others know practically nothing about.

We must be willing to learn the lesson that cooperation may imply compromise, but if it brings a world advance it is a gain for each individual nation.

Understanding is a two-way street.

Poor minds talk about people average minds talk about events great minds talk about ideas

Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.

Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you'll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there's no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?

It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

Courage is exhilarating.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do ...

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.