Eleanor Roosevelt

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.

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

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

You don’t get respect if you don’t deserve it

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

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

Let us try what love will do.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.