Eleanor Roosevelt

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

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

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

You don’t create things, you discover things.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.