Eleanor Roosevelt

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

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.

There is nothing to fear except fear it’s self.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

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.

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their moneys worth, except for these.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.