Eleanor Roosevelt

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until they are in hot water.

Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product of a life well lived.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

The disciplined are free.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

I believe in the limitlessness of humans. We’re capable of incredible things. At times that realization is frightening.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

Every other enjoyment malice may destroy; every other panegyric envy may withhold; but no human power can deprive the boaster of his own encomiums.

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.