Eleanor Roosevelt

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?

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one – to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.

Today is a king in disguise.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

America is another name for opportunity.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.