Eleanor Roosevelt

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

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

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

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.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.

If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, neverin nothing, great or small, large or pettynever give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.