Eleanor Roosevelt

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.

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.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

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.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.