Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

You must try to understand truthfully what makes you do things or feel things. Until you have been able to face the truth about yourself you cannot be really sympathetic or understanding in regard to what happens to other people. But it takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do.

Occasionally he took us on a picnic or a camping trip and taught us many valuable lessons. The chief one was to remember that camping was a good way to find out people’s characters. Those who were selfish showed it very soon, in that they wanted the best bed or the best food and did not want to do their share of the work.

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.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.

We obtain our education at home, at school, and, most important, from life itself. The learning process must go on as long as we live.

If we can keep that flexibility of mind, that hospitality toward new ideas, we will be able to welcome the new flow of thought from wherever it comes, not resisting it; weighing and evaluating and exploring the strange new concepts that confront us at every turn. We cannot shut the windows and pull down the shades; we cannot say, “I have learned all I need to know; my opinions are fixed on everything. I refuse to change or to consider these new things.” Not today. Not any more.

There is a wonderful word, why?, that children use. All children. When they stop using it, the reason, too often, is that no one bothered to answer them, no one tried to keep alive one of the most important attributes a person can have: interest in the world around him.

I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise — good or bad — that came along would be welcomed as part of the whole enthralling experience.

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.

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.

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."

I learned, too, while I was groping for more and more effective ways of trying to cope with community and national and world problems, that you can accomplish a great deal more if you care deeply about what is happening to other people than if you say in apathy or discouragement, “Oh, what can I do? What use is one person? I might as well not bother.” Actually I suppose the caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person. If you cannot imagine, “This might happen to me,” you are able to say to yourself with indifference, “Who cares?” I think that one of the reasons it is so difficult for us, as a people, to understand other areas of the world is that we cannot put ourselves imaginatively in their place. We have no famine. But if we were actually to see people dying of starvation we would care quite

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 never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.