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.

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.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. But this, at least, I believe with all my heart: In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

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.

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.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.

If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy.

Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you’ll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there’s no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

This is your life, not someone else’s. It is your own feeling of what is important, not what people will say.

So you had better learn fairly early that you must not expect to have everyone understand what you say and what you do.

The minimum, the very basic minimum, of a citizen’s duty is to cast a vote on election day. Even now, too few of us discharge this minimal duty. By such negligence, such indifference, such sheer laziness, we discard, unused, a gift and a privilege obtained for us at gigantic cost and sacrifice.

But if our chief obligation is to cast a vote, this carries with it a further duty—to vote intelligently.

To vote intelligently you must have an understanding of issues and the different points of view as to how they can best be handled. You must have some way of appraising and evaluating the men who appeal for your suffrage to enable them to handle the issues. You must understand how things get done through political action. You must know, in general if not in particular, what kind of country you want to live in and how these issues will affect the main picture.

We must, for the most part, rely for much of our information on four main sources: the President of the United States, who is, or should be, the great educator of the people, bringing issues to them and explaining the situation; the great mass media of communication, newspapers, radio, television, which are, or should be, vehicles for bringing unbiased reports of news events, economic and political conditions; the the commentators who are, or should be, analysts of the news, of economics, of contemporary history, of political leaders, based on a wider source of information and a broader experience than the average voter can possibly have; and discussion, frank and open, no holds barred, on men and policies with friends and neighbors.

Unless indoctrinated, a child is too logical to understand discrimination. It is the duty of every self-respecting citizen to oppose the prejudiced indoctrination of children, to take his courage in his hands and say clearly, “I do not agree with this. I feel we are performing a great and senseless injustice.”