Eleanor Roosevelt

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

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

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Friends are thieves of time.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

That man is idle who can do something better.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

He who would begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.