Top 350 Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you professed, but how your faith translated itself in your life.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

152. “Choose a challenge instead of competence.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

153. “We will never have peace without friendship around the world.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

154. “It is curious how much more interest can be evoked by a mixture of gossip, romance and mystery than by facts.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

155. “What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

156. “No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

157. “Everybody wants something.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

158. “In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

159. “The very next thing you need to be doing is the thing that terrifies you the most.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

160. “Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

161. “What you don’t do can be a destructive force.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

162. “There is nothing to fear except fear it’s self.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

163. “You do the things that need to be done according to priority.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

164. “Curiosity must be kept alive.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

165. “Terrific minds focus on tips; average minds go over activities; little minds talk about people today.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

166. “The leisure class is one in which individuals have sufficient economic security and sufficient leisure to find opportunity for a variety of satisfactions in life.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

167. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

168. “The word liberal comes from the word free. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

169. “Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

170. “What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

171. “Change means the unknown.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

172. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

173. “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

174. “We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

175. “Beautiful old people are works of art.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

176. “Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

177. “We must be willing to learn the lesson that cooperation may imply compromise, but if it brings a world advance it is a gain for each individual nation.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

178. “Work is always an antidote to depression.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

179. “The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

180. “No, I have never wanted to be a man. I have often wanted to be more effective as a woman, but I have never felt that trousers would do the trick!”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

181. “A democratic form of government, a democratic way of life, presupposes free public education over a long period; it presupposes also an education for personal responsibility that too often is neglected.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

182. “Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

183. “Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

184. “I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

185. “No one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

186. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

187. “You achieve strength, braveness and confidence by each experience in which you really halt to search dread during the deal with.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

188. “Most women, I think, though they may complain a little about this, would agree that meeting the needs of others is not a real burden; it is what makes life worth living. It is probably the deepest satisfaction a woman has.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

189. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

190. “A day out-of-doors, someone I loved to talk with, a good book and some simple food and music – that would be rest.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

191. “Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

192. “Caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

193. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

194. “Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

195. “The people who came to New England, came for freedom of religion. The problem is, freedom of religion to them meant freedom for only their religion.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

196. “Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

197. “I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

198. “No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

199. “We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind, that is the approval by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

200. “There is nothing to regret – either for those who go or for those who are left behind.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt