Top 528 Quotes & Sayings by Eleanor Roosevelt - Page 3

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.

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.

We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, before it becomes an accepted rule.

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

Of course, I do not believe in having everyone who is a liberal called a communist, or everyone who is conservative called a fascist.

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

Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run, it is easier.

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Comparison is the thief of all joy.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

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.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being - we can do it.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

You never know anyone until you marry them.

The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe.

On the whole our armed services have been doing pretty well in the way of keeping us defended, but I hope our State Department will remember that it is really the department of achieving peace.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know.

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.

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

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must not, for whatever reason, turn his back on life." Another "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Friends, you and me... you brought another friend... and then there were three... we started our group... our circle of friends... and like that circle... there is no beginning or end.

It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.

We will never have peace without friendship around the world.

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

Develop a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide!

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may 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 ever were before. . . . 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 lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.

Life is like a parachute jump, you've got to get it right the first time.

Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life.

The more we simplify our material needs the more we are free to think of other things.

a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.

No human being can ever "own" another, whether in friendship, love, marriage or parenthood. Many human relationships have been ruined and happiness far too often changed to misery by a failure to understand this.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

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.

The very next thing you need to be doing is the thing that terrifies you the most.

A great deal of fear is a result of just “not knowing.” We do not know what is involved in a new situation. We do not know whether we can deal with it. The sooner we learn what it entails, the sooner we can dissolve our fear.

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.

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

Anger is one letter short of danger.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.

Before we can make friends with anyone else, we must first make friends with ourselves.

It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person, creates a bond which nothing seems able to break.

The word liberal comes from the word free. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.

I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few

The giving of love and understanding is an education in itself.

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.

Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted.

It's your life-but only if you make it so.

Philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

Most of the work that's done in the world gets done by people who weren't feeling all that well at the time that they did it.

The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

The American Dream can no more remain static than can the American nation.... We cannot any longer take an old approach to world problems. They aren't the same problems. It isn't the same world. We must not adopt the methods of our ancestors; instead, we must emulate that pioneer quality in our ancestors that made them attempt new methods for a New World.

We are given in our newspapers and on TV and radio exactly what we, the public, insist on having, and this very frequently is mediocre information and mediocre entertainment.

The destiny of human rights is in the hands of all our citizens in all our communities.

Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.

Women are like tea bags.They do not know how strong they are until they get into hot water.