Eleanor Roosevelt

“Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people? (16 October 1939)”

“No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. (20 December 1939)”

“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. (23 February 1940)”

“I have a great belief in spiritual force, but I think we have to realize that spiritual force alone has to have material force with it so long as we live in a material world. The two together make a strong combination. (17 May 1940)”

“Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me or I wouldn't be wearing it!”

“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."”

“Understanding is a two-way street.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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. (1 July 1940)”

“To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.”

“Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

“My husband plunged into work on a speech and I went off to work on an article. Midnight came and bed for all, and all that was said was "good night, sleep well, pleasant dreams, with the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.'”

“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.”

“When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”

“I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.”

“Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”

“You get more joy out of the giving to others, and should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give.”

“One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable. (11 September 1941)”

“I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.”

“On April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman received an urgent summons from the White House. When he arrived, Eleanor Roosevelt told him, “The President is dead.” Truman asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Mrs. Roosevelt responded, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.””

“I 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 against a wall".”

“Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.”

“The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.”

“The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

“One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. … All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there's one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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. (1 April 1939)”