Eleanor Roosevelt

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

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