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.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

I never waste time looking back.

Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

Anger is one letter short of danger.

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.

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.

Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation.

It seems to me that it is the basic right of any human being to work.

The freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat.

We don't become heroes overnight." - One step at a time, eventually discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

...without equality there can be no democracy.

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.

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

A day out-of-doors, someone I loved to talk with, a good book and some simple food and music - that would be rest.

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

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

Women are like tea bags: put them in hot water and they get stronger.

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.

We must do that which we think we cannot.

If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.

There is nothing to fear except fear it's self.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. Anger is only one letter short of danger. If someone betrays you once, it is his fault; if he betrays you twice, it is your fault. Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. He who loses money, loses much; he who loses a friend, loses much more; he who loses faith, loses all.

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

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it.

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.

When you have decided what you believe, what you feel must be done, have the courage to stand alone and be counted

No leader can be too far ahead of his followers.

No human being can ever 'own' another, whether in friendship, love, marriage, or parenthood.