Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.

When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense.

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.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

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.

It is, however, the better part of wisdom to regard the mistake as experience which will help guide you in the future, a part, though a painful part, of your education.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

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.

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 today?

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

There is no experience from which you can't learn something.

There are no have-to's, just choices

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

Some People Make Things Happen,
Some Watch Things Happen,
While Others Wonder What Has Happened.

We talk so often about the differences between people, yet here in our country we find that, in spite of circumstances which create great differences, we have certain great similarities. Rich or poor, we want our children to be well educated. Rich or poor, we want them to do better than we have done. Rich or poor, we want the respect of our neighbors and perhaps their affection. Love and death come to us all, no matter what the circumstances of our lives. In the big things that matter, the similarities are far greater than the differences. If this is true at home it is true anywhere in the world. People want the same things. They strive for the same things. They suffer from the same things. The differences are important but often superficial. The basic things are similar.