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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

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

Education provides the necessary tools, equipment by which we learn how to learn.

The kinds of things with which you surround a child will sink into his consciousness.

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

One phase of life has ended and another has begun. Or rather, one has merged into another and broadened.

I have liked to know as many different kinds of people as possible, from all possible walks of life, from all sorts of environment, from many nations and cultures.

Those years, weeks, hours, are the sands in the glass running swiftly away. To let them drift through our fingers is tragic waste. To use them to the hilt, making them count for something, is the beginning of wisdom.

“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.”

That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give you.

when you understand yourself clearly it is easier for you to understand more clearly the people whom you love.

So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.

If you try to change that individual so that he loses his personality, you have done something that has destroyed the most important thing about a human being, his essential difference from anybody else.

Maturity means, too, an ability to take criticism and evaluate it.

The man, on the other hand, often grows up with the idea that he should be able to dominate the forces of nature, the forces of his material world. He seeks to make them adjust to him.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge.

But the changes that come in the middle and later years are an indication of the decline of one’s power, of deterioration. You were accustomed to doing certain things. Suddenly you discover that you can’t do them any more. This, I think, is a harder situation to meet and to meet gracefully.

Whatever period of life we are in is good only to the extent that we make use of it, that we live it to the hilt, that we continue to develop and understand what it has to offer us and we have to offer it. The rewards for each age are different in kind, but they are not necessarily different in value or in satisfaction.

To be able to build new relations is as important as to hold the old ones, though sometimes one is obliged to sever old relationships for a great variety of reasons.

No relationship in this world ever remains warm and close unless a real effort is made on both sides to keep it so.

The ownership of books is a token of moving up the social as well as the cultural ladder.

What she wanted, with quiet stubbornness, was to return to the life that was gone.

But words, even when they seem to fail to communicate, are better than bombs.

To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.

Too many people have forgotten good manners and their importance in smoothing and making gracious and pleasant our dealing with our fellows.

A graciousness of manner which avoids hurting another person or making him ill at ease. A graciousness of the heart.

I can only answer that one has no right, once one’s children are grown and mature, to interfere with their decisions. If asked, you should state how you feel, how you think. But until asked, it is an intrusion to thrust your ideas on any grown human being.

Mutual respect is the basis of all civilized human relationships.

If you approach each new person you meet in a spirit of adventure you will find that you become increasingly interested in them and endlessly fascinated by the new channels of thought and experience and personality that you encounter.

The orders are obeyed. But they are often obeyed at the price of resentment and the loss of self-respect.

Love and death come to us all, no matter what the circumstances of our lives.

by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

“It wasn’t my fault.” That is an almost instinctive reaction to failure of any kind. But this is the point of cleavage between the mature and the immature individual. The mature person will admit, “It was my fault. The mistake was of my own making. Now that I understand why it happened, why I made the wrong choice, I’ll try not to make the same mistake again.” But the person who clings to his alibi, “It wasn’t my fault,” not only is lying to himself but he is evading his responsibility. He will make the same mistake over and over and continue to feel terribly sorry for himself. The circumstances were beyond his control, weren’t they?

the narrower you make the circle of your friends, the narrower will be your experience of people and the narrower will your interests become.

Because it is the most highly developed type of government, democracy requires the most highly developed citizens.

Unless indoctrinated, a child is too logical to understand discrimination.

If you want a world ruled by law and not by force you must build up, from the very grassroots, a respect for law. It is the code we have created for our mutual safety and well-being. It is our bulwark against chaos. It is the fabric of our civilization.

A politician interested only in his own personal advancement is not only useless as a public servant but he will eventually fail.

A man can protect himself with fists or sword but his best weapon is his intellect.