Eleanor Roosevelt

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

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

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.

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

If you have inner peace, nobody can force you to be a slave to the outer reality.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.