Quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt


Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Actors are one family over the entire world.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I could never say in the morning, I have a headache and cannot do thus and so. Headache or no headache, thus and so had to be done.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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. Curiousity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
If you have any interests you can gain a wider audience for those interests while the goldfish bowl is yours!
– Eleanor Roosevelt
If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
So I took an interest in politics, but I don't know whether I enjoyed it! It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours - and I think probably gave me many nightmares.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The giving of love is an education in itself.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Understanding is a two-way street.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
What is to give light must endure the burning.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!
– Eleanor Roosevelt
You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
You must do the things you think you cannot do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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 have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I'm so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Great minds discuss ideas average minds discuss events small minds discuss people.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
– Eleanor Roosevelt