Eleanor Roosevelt

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.

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.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

The way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Hunger is never delicate; they who are seldom gorged to the full with praise may be safely fed with gross compliments, for the appetite must be satisfied before it is disgusted.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.

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

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.