Theodore Roosevelt Life Quotations

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of strenuous life

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

No man needs sympathy because he has to work. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his body - to risk his well-being - to risk his life - in a great cause

In life, as in football, the principle to follow is to hit the line hard.

In speaking to you men of the greatest city of the West, men of the state which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.

Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy.

The world wants the kind of men who do not shrink from temporary defeats in life; but come again and wrestle triumph from defeat.

The men and women who have the right ideals . . . are those who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty.

It's not having been in the Dark House, but having left it that counts.

Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.

If we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.

The men and women who have the right ideals... are those who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty.