Eleanor Roosevelt

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

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 do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it as not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

How can they expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed time of character.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.