Quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may 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 ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

A man can protect himself with fists or sword but his best weapon is his intellect.

If the mind is clean, the body can take care of itself.

If you step on other people's necks to get rich, or barter your personal honor, then it is others who pay for your success and you can hardly call it your own. If, however, you build something that is of benefit to other people, give them an opportunity to rise with you on your upward climb, you make a contribution.

Each of us, ultimately, is responsible in large part for the welfare of his community, for the kind of government he has, for the world he lives in.

But the courage to go against a sweep of feeling, to be an awkward minority, to stand up and be counted, even when it makes one unpopular, is not as prevalent as it should be. We have a long way to go to achieve responsible citizenship and common self-respecting humanity.

I became a much more ardent citizen and feminist than anyone about me in the intermediate years would have dreamed possible. I had learned that if you wanted to institute any kind of reform, you could get far more attention if you had a vote than if you lacked one.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

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.

No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.