Plenty of famous quotes are known for having Eleanor Roosevelt’s trademark on them, and they have made their way into our collective consciousness. But Eleanor Roosevelt was so much more than a great speaker. Sure, she was trusted with giving speeches and appearing at campaign events in her husband’s place after he was diagnosed with a paralytic illness. Still, it’s her work as an activist for civil and human rights that contributed to her reshaping the role of a First Lady.
It’s no secret that Eleanor Roosevelt was a woman ahead of her time. Born into a wealthy family and married to one of the most prominent politicians in the United States, she was undoubtedly set up for success. But she chose to devote her privileged position to public service, becoming an activist and advocate for women’s emancipation, racial equality, and civil rights.
She already had tremendous influence during FDR’s presidency, but that influence didn’t stop when she left the White House. In fact, it was only heightened by her willingness to speak out about widespread intolerance — and she did so with passion and conviction. She was the first to recognize that the New Deal programs discriminated against African Americans, who got a disproportionate share of relief money.
Clearly, she wasn’t immune to hate. Eleanor Roosevelt often disagreed with her husband’s decisions when she thought they could harm minorities and was vocal in publicly defending Japanese Americans after the widespread anti-Asian hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
She was a force to be reckoned with, and her legacy lives on today in the hearts of many. The least we can do to celebrate such a prominent figure is to spread the inspiring words from her speeches, public appearances, and books. We put together our favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quotes that inspired the world with her wit, intelligence, and compassion.
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“He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.”
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
“Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.”
“We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.”
“Friendship with one’s self is all-important because, without it, one can not be friends with anyone else in the world.”
“There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.”
“If you lose the money you lose much. If you lose friends you lose more. If you lose faith you lose all.”
“You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.”
“Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it.”
“One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.”
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”
“Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are, are that they aren’t paying attention to you.”
“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.”
“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
“Each of us has... all the time there is. Those years, weeks, and hours, are the sands in the glass running swiftly away. To let them drift through our fingers is a tragic waste. To use them to the hilt, making them count for something, is the beginning of wisdom.”
“Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”
“It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
“Think as little as possible about yourself. Think as much as possible about other people.”
“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”
“The greatest give you can give a child is an imagination.”
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for a newer and richer experience.”
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
“It is a brave thing to have the courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.”
“We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.”
“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.”
“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.”
“People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.”
“Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”
“The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.”
“I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.”
“Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?”
“In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.”
“Do whatever comes your way to do as well as you can. Think as little as possible about yourself. Think as much as possible about other people. Dwell on things that are interesting. 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.”
“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.”
“Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.”
“The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long-standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.”
“No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.”
“Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.”
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most… Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”
“Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply be what is generally called a ‘success.”
“It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.”
“Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”
“One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. 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.”
“Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you'll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there's no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.”
“Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?”
“What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person”
“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual you have an obligation to be one.”
“If you can develop this ability to see what you look at, to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn and to grow as long as you live and you’ll have a wonderful time doing it.”
“If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for, in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.”
“Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.”
“If you want a world ruled by law and not by force you must build up, from the very grassroots, a respect for the law.”
“Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.”
“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”
“I believe anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.”
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for a newer and richer experiences.”
“Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.”
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for a newer and richer experience.”
“You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself.”
“I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.”
“To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.”
“I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing, is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.”
“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run, it is easier. 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.”
“Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer — that is the ultimate success.”
“If a man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.”
“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.”
“I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.”
“Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge.”
“Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun.”
“Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.”
“Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.”
“Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.”
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
“The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.”
“Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.”
“It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.”
“Up to a certain point, it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.”
“We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.”
“When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.”
“Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life.”
“Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation.”
“Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”
“It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.”
“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.”
“If a man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.”
