Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

This is the comfort of the godly: the grave cannot hold them, and they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.

Whatever advice you give, be short.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Friends… they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.