Top 350 Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “This is not a time when women should be patient. We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

202. “It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person, creates a bond which nothing seems able to break.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

203. “I have a great objection to seeing anyone, particularly anyone whom I care about, lose his self-control.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

204. “If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being – we can do it.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

205. “I have learned long ago to possess my soul in patience and accept the inevitable.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

206. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

207. “The purpose of life afterall is to live it.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

208. “The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our Government.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

209. “A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

210. “Once your children are grown up and have children of their own, the problems are theirs and the less the older generation interferes the better.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

211. “If you have to compromise, be sure to compromise up.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

212. “I once 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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

213. “Do not be afraid of mistakes, provided you do not make the same one twice.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

214. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

215. “No human being can ever “own” another, whether in friendship, love, marriage or parenthood. Many human relationships have been ruined and happiness far too often changed to misery by a failure to understand this.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

216. “I have often felt that I cheated my children a little. I was never so totally theirs as most mothers are. I gave to audiences whatbelonged to my children, got back from audiences the love my children longed to give me.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

217. “You rarely achieve finality. If you did, life would be over, but as you strive new visions open before you, new possibilities for the satisfaction of living.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

218. “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

219. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

220. “Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

221. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

222. “I never thought of achievement. I just did what came along for me to do – the thing that gave me the most pleasure.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

223. “There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

224. “Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

225. “Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

226. “One should always sleep in all of one’s guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

227. “One of the first things we must get rid of is the idea that democracy is tantamount to capitalism.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

228. “One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

229. “You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

230. “Every age is an unknown country.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

231. “The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

232. “Because they have so little, children must rely on imagination rather than experience.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

233. “As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

234. “The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

235. “There are no have-to’s, just choices.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

236. “You never know anyone until you marry them.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

237. “Sometimes it is extremely good for you to forget that there is anything in the world which needs to be done, and to do some particular thing that you want to do. Every human being needs a certain amount of time in which he can be peaceful.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

238. “Get out of the way as quickly as you’re not needed.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

239. “I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

240. “Courage is exhilarating.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

241. “We need our radicals.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

242. “It is so much easier to be enthusiastic than to reason!”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

243. “How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

244. “I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

245. “Think as little as possible about yourself and as much as possible about other people.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

246. “Whatever come we have to meet it.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

247. “Strength that goes wrong is even more dangerous than weakness that goes wrong.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

248. “Every day do something that frightens you.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

249. “No one from the beginning of time has had security.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

250. “Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt