Eleanor Roosevelt

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

If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

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

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

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.