Eleanor Roosevelt
American First Lady, diplomat and activist, 1884-1962
39 quotes.
Quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt
- A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.
- A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.
- Before we can make friends with anyone else, we must first make friends with ourselves.
- Do one thing every day that scares you.
- For our own success to be real, it must contribute to the success of others.
- Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
- Great Minds Discuss Ideas, Average Minds Discuss Events, Small Minds Discuss People
- Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
- I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.
- I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could. (8 November 1944)
- It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
- It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.
- It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know.
- Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
- No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.
- No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
- Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’
- Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.
- People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
- Perhaps one can learn only by one’s own mistakes. The essential thing is to learn. Learning and living.
- Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.
- Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
- The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
- The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.
- 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.
- There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
- To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
- We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
- We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity.
- What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?
- When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
- You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude
- You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
- You gain strength, courage, and confidence by doing the thing which you think you cannot do.
- You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
- You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
- You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
- I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
- In the long run we shape our lives and shape ourselves. The process never dies. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.