Eleanor Roosevelt

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.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

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

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

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

She stepped out barefoot on to the grass, her soul naked, sun beating to her heart’s rhythm, bathing her skin. In her mind, she had already escaped.

To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you don’t need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.