Eleanor Roosevelt

Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until they are in hot water.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

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.

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.

It is a strange desire, to seek power and lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains, and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.