You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

by Eleanor Roosevelt

When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

We obtain our education at home, at school, and, most important, from life itself.

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 grow only as long as we are interested.

Today, living and learning must go hand in hand. Each new bit of knowledge, each new experience is an extra tool in meeting new problems and working them out.

FEAR has always seemed to me to be the worst stumbling block which anyone has to face. It is the great crippler.

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.

It has always seemed important to me that women should try to develop some interests in which their whole family can share. This is valuable all around.

Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time.

Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it.

“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 all of us need both love and charity.”