Eleanor Roosevelt

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

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

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

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

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

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

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Leave the rest to the gods.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.