WednesdayJan 28, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
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 lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' ... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Too many of us stay walled up because we are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experiences behind him.
The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our Government.
Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do and damned if you don't.
It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.
Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.
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.
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.
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.
After the discovery in 1918 of love letters revealing that Franklin was involved with Lucy Mercer: The bottom dropped out of my own particular world, I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.
It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.
I believe that all that we go through here must have some value.
You always admire what you really don't understand.
Advice on campaign behavior for first ladies: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Remember to lean back in the parade so everybody can see the president. Be sure not to get too fat, because you'll have to sit three in the back.
I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.
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 [future first ladies] will feel that you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.
Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.
Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the moment 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.
Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.
This is a strange, little, complacent country [Switzerland], in many ways a USA in miniature but of course nearer the center of disturbance!
We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face.... We must do that which we think we cannot.
With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
Real prosperity can only come when everybody prospers.
I wish for those I love this New Year an opportunity to earn sufficient, to have that which they need for their own and to give that which they desire to others, to bring into the lives of those about them some measure of joy, to know the satisfaction of work well done, of recreation earned and therefore savored, to end the year a little wiser, a little kinder and therefore a little happier.
It is not so much what people do in this world as their reasons for doing it which really makes a difference. Sacrifices are not so important as the reasons for which you sacrifice, and no sacrifice is any good which remains ever present as such.
There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.
The kind of calm which comes when one has done the best one can.
It seems difficult to make humanity rise to certain heights except in crises.
Without doubt human beings are the most interesting study in the world.
All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.
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.
Many people have so much to bear themselves that sympathy for anyone else is out of the question.
Happiness may exist under all conditions, given the right kind of people and sufficient economic security for adequate food and shelter.
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 wonder if Communists occupied in producing plays are not safer than Communists starving to death. I have always felt that whatever your beliefs might be, if you could earn enough to keep body and soul together and had to be pretty busy doing that, you would not be very apt to have time to plot the overthrow of any existing government.
The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was.
Laws are only observed with he consent of the individuals concerned and a moral change still depends on the individual and not on the passage of any law.
How can the men who have enacted this legislation go home and face their wives and children, when they have decreed starvation for other men's wives and children?
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?
We have all made such a fetish of financial success and forgotten frequently that success of any kind, when it does not include success in one's personal relationships, is bound in the end to leave both the man and the woman with very little real satisfaction.
If you have any interests you can gain a wider audience for those interests while the goldfish bowl is yours!
So often people you admire at a distance do not mean so much to you after you meet them.
I have felt that people were 'mean-mad' at times and wondered if life were not treating them so harshly that they were unable to retain any of the qualities which make people lovable and that make life worth living.
When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.
Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.
Conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand.
Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.
Marriage and the up-bringing of children in the home require as well-trained a mind and as well-disciplined a character as any other occupation that might be considered a career.
I think we ought to impress on both our girls and boys that successful marriages require just as much work, just as much intelligence and just as much unselfish devotion, as they give to any position they undertake to fill on a paid basis.
I have learned long ago to possess my soul in patience and accept the inevitable.
It is our freedom to progress that makes us all want to live and to go on.
This living in a democracy is a problem, isn't it?
The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.
Whatever come we have to meet it.
One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable.
Long ago, I made up my mind that when things were said involving only me, I would pay no attention to them, except when valid criticism was carried by which I could profit.
To some of us, hunger was more academic than real, but we must try to develop the ability to feel the urgency of such a situation.
My life can be so arranged that I can live on whatever I have. If I cannot live as I have lived in the past, I shall live differently, and living differently does not mean living with less attention to the things that make life gracious and pleasant or with less enjoyment of things of the mind.
One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short.
At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want--for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.
One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.
Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.
I have never felt that anything really mattered by the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
At any age it does us no harm to look over our past shortcomings and plan to improve our characters and actions in the coming year.
I would not be happy unless I had some regular work to do every day and I imagine that I will always feel that way no matter how old I am.
An economic policy which does not consider the well-being of all will not serve the purposes of peace and the growth of well-being among the people of all nations.
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