Eleanor Roosevelt

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?

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.

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

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.

Possessions are always secondary, loved ones are all that matters.

Truth over Harmony.

I think every parent, every generation has wanted their children to do better and have a higher standard of living. But I think there’s too much guilt.

If someone out there doesn’t agree with me, then somewhere a village is missing their idiot.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

The achievement of one goal should be the starting point of another.

Not only can you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it when you’re having it.

Whatever it is, people who have more spare time than people ever had before get the sense of whirlwind pressure,and repeat the common criticism that ‘we are going too fast.’ Yet the people live longer than ever before, live with less effort, live on a higher plane. Is it possible that this common saying about our rapid pace is just another thoughtless mob suggestion?

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.

Come to me, wild and untamed. Bring the oceans on your lips, the mountains on your spine; I want to explore all the places you have ever called home. Let me pluck each petal from the gardens you’ve grown, overcrowded seedlings pushing up through your bones. Come to me dipped in the stars, come to me wearing all your scars. I want to show you just how beautiful you are.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Clouds float in the same pattern only once.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.