Quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt

In the very desire for help one is apt to forget that the objective should be to enable the individual to stand on his own feet.

Perhaps the older generation is often to blame with its cautious warning: "Take a job that will give you security, not adventure." But I say to the young: "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 a competence.

So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.

Politics is the participation of the citizen in his government. The kind of government he has depends entirely on the quality of that participation. Therefore, every single one of us must learn, as early as possible, to understand and accept our duties as a citizen.

The answer to fear is not to cower and hide; it is not to surrender feebly without contest. The answer is to stand and face it boldly. Look at it, analyze it, and, in the end, act.

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.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to really look fear in the face... Do the thing you think you cannot do.

Or perhaps one can learn only by one's own mistakes. The essential thing is to learn. Learning and living.

Você deve fazer as coisas que acha que não consegue fazer.

Timidity and shyness are fears of this sort. Unimportant, perhaps, but they are crippling to self-confidence and to achievement.

If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won't be shy.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

Human relationships, like life itself, can never remain static. They grow or they diminish. But, in either case, they change. Our emotional interests, our intellectual pursuits, our personal preoccupations, all change. So do those of our friends. So the relationship that binds us together must change too; it must be flexible enough to meet the alterations of person and circumstance

Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.

The danger lies in the possibility that we will not accept the person as he is but try to make him over according to our own ideas.

Every time you meet a crisis and live through it, you make it simpler for the next time. If you draw back and say, "I am afraid to do that," because you might do or say something wrong or you might make a mistake, you will become timid and negative as a person.

Obviously, it requires effort to use all your potentialities to the best of your ability, to stretch your horizon, to grasp every opportunity as it comes, but it is certainly more interesting than holding off timidly, afraid to take a chance, afraid to fail.

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.

You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.

One reason for this ability to cope with disaster is that nothing ever happens to us except what happens in our minds. Unhappiness is an inward, not an outward, thing. It is as independent of circumstances as is happiness. Consider the truly happy people you know. I think it is unlikely that you will find that circumstances have made them happy. They have made themselves happy in spite of circumstances.

This, I think, is one of the most effective and rewarding forms of education. The interest is there, lurking somewhere in another person. You have only to seek for it. It will make every encounter a challenge and it will keep alive one of the most valuable qualities a person has—curiosity.

The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom." This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then—it has to be lived with. For 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.

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.