Eleanor Roosevelt

Understanding is a two-way street.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

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

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

They have a right to censure that have a heart to help: the rest is cruelty, not justice.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.

In the scenery of spring, nothing is better, nothing worse; the flowering branches are; some long, some short.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Every old poem is sacred.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.