Eleanor Roosevelt

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Once 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 up against a wall.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about 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.

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

Without passion, you don’t have energy. Without energy, you have nothing.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

Riches are for spending.

It is all right to rat, but you can’t re-rat.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others: And such will not be apt to overshoot the Mark. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: And he that forgives first, wins the [Laurel]. If I am even with my Enemy, the Debt is paid; but if I forgive it, I oblige him for ever.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.