Eleanor Roosevelt

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

Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until they are in hot water.

If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.

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

There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.