Eleanor Roosevelt

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.

Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Courage is exhilarating.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

People sleep, and when they die they wake.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.