Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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.

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.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth.

Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Business is the salt of life.