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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. 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.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

the most important ingredients in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.

Nobody can learn all he needs to know.

Why was your mind given you but to think things out for yourself?”

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.

This part of learning—learning as you go—gives life its salt.

We cannot shut the windows and pull down the shades; we cannot say, “I have learned all I need to know; my opinions are fixed on everything. I refuse to change or to consider these new things.” Not today. Not any more.

Many people seem to go through life without seeing. They do not know how to look around them.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

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.

When things that happen to you are inevitable there is a kind of courage that comes from sheer desperation. If it is inevitable and has to be met, you can meet it.

Every time you meet a crisis and live through it, you make it simpler for the next time.

Actually, when you come to understand self-discipline you begin to understand the limits of freedom. You grasp the fact that freedom is never absolute, that it must always be contained within the framework of other people’s freedom.

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.

We have all the time there is. The problem is: How shall we make the best use of it?

Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique.

No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours.

Maturity also means that you have set your values, that you know what you really want out of life. What are the things that give you great satisfaction?

We are constantly advancing, like explorers, into the unknown, which makes life an adventure all the way.

nothing ever happens to us except what happens in our minds.

the terrible strength which is weakness.

It’s your life—but only if you make it so.

you fear in apprehension far more than you actually suffer in reality.

Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply to be what is generally called “a success.”

being a success is tied up very closely with being one’s own kind of individual.

This is your life, not someone else’s.

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.

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.

we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

Failure comes to everyone, except when one does nothing at all, which in itself is a failure.

We must not expect of the child what we do not expect of ourselves, namely, that he will be absolutely right. We must help the child to understand that there can be no perfect choices.

Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.

Corruption? Well, unhappily, yes. There is corruption in politics because there are human beings in politics. There is corruption in business and in law and in medicine. But when there is corruption it is because we allow it to grow and flourish. There is only one way of combating corruption: that is not by eschewing politics; it is by developing standards of honor, living up to them, and requiring them of our candidates.