Eleanor Roosevelt

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

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

All of life is a constant education.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent – for every effect a perfect cause – and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.