Eleanor Roosevelt

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

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

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

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Never be bored, and you will never be boring.

In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.