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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

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.

She would turn to the map of the area of the world we were learning about and tell us to remember our geography because it affected history.

“You are giving me back what I gave you,” she said, “and it does not interest me. You have not sifted it through your own intelligence. Why was your mind given you but to think things out for yourself?”

It became a challenge for me to think about all the different sides of a situation and try to find new points that Mlle. Souvestre had not covered, points that had not even been covered in our books. It was rather exciting to have these questions come to my mind as I read

We obtain our education at home, at school, and, most important, from life itself. The learning process must go on as long as we live.

we can grow only as long as we are interested.

It is never enough, it seems to me, to teach a child mere information. In the first place, we have to face the fact that no one can acquire all there is to learn about any subject. What is essential is to train the mind so that it is capable of finding facts as it needs them, train it to learn how to learn.

The essential thing is that he is so trained that he can use his mind as a tool, a supple instrument to dig out the facts as he needs them. But facts, after all, are a comparatively small part of education.

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.

There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

Knowing my own deficiencies, I made a game of trying to make people talk about whatever they were interested in and learning as much as I could about their particular subject.

You must be interested in anything that comes your way.

The kinds of things with which you surround a child will sink into his consciousness. Years ago, when I made Val-Kill furniture, copies of American antiques, I gave some pieces to my children for their own rooms at home so that, when they married, they would have some furniture of their own. I discovered an interesting thing. The children who had these replicas of antiques began, without being taught, to recognize finish, the beauty of wood, how the pieces were put together. If a drawer was fitted and pegged instead of being nailed together they noticed it right away. They became very discriminating.

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.

All the minor skirmishes against fear had resulted, after all, in a kind of victory.

In doing it you not only free yourself from another shackling fear but you stretch your mental muscles and gain the freedom that comes with achievement.

Obviously, it requires effort to use all your potentialities to the best of your ability, to stretch your horizon, to grasp every opportunity as it comes, but it is certainly more interesting than holding off timidly, afraid to take a chance, afraid to fail.

If you can give them a trust in God, they will have one sure way of meeting all the uncertainties of existence.

The wider their range of experience, the greater the variety of people they encounter in their home life, the farther their horizons will extend and the more hospitable to new ideas they will be as they go out into the world.

Each of us has,

all the time there is. 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.

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.

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.

One reason for this ability to cope with disaster is that nothing ever happens to us except what happens in our minds. Unhappiness is an inward, not an outward, thing. It is as independent of circumstances as is happiness. Consider the truly happy people you know. I think it is unlikely that you will find that circumstances have made them happy. They have made themselves happy in spite of circumstances.

People can surmount what seems to be total defeat, difficulties too great to be borne, but it requires a capacity to readjust endlessly to the changing conditions of life.

Daughters will be grateful and remember all their lives the things which their fathers introduced them to: gentleness and thoughtfulness and appreciation of themselves as women. These are qualities which, someday, they will look for in their maturity.

HAPPINESS is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

When I found myself alone I might, quite easily, have decided that I would give up my usual activities, that from then on I was going to do only what I really wanted for my own pleasure. Perhaps, in the beginning, my family and my friends and my associates would have been shocked. But in a very little while they would have accepted the changed situation, my place would have been filled by others, and I myself would have been forgotten and, worse, unneeded. It is easy to slip into self-absorption and it is equally fatal. When one becomes absorbed in himself, in his health, in his personal problems, or in the small details of daily living, he is, at the same time, losing interest in other people; worse, he is losing his ties to life.

For each of us our load of trouble is our personal burden to carry, not something to be sloughed off on someone else. Also, and it’s a curious thing, if you don’t make a parade of your unhappiness to someone else, you’ll find it is a lot easier to get over it.

Most women, I have already said, learn early in life to make adjustments of their own wishes and plans to meet the needs of others. But most women, I think, though they may complain a little about this, would agree that meeting the needs of others is not a real burden; it is what makes life worth living. It is probably the deepest satisfaction a woman has.

The need to be needed is much stronger in most of us than we are aware. We hear a great deal about the need for self-expression but, by and large, it rarely brings the same returns in basic satisfaction that come ...

The children have learned that they must carry their share of the work around the house and this has made them feel that they are truly a part of it, and especially, a needed part.

respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

To be useful is, in a way, to justify one’s own existence.

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

WE ALL create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a very real sense, by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

The kind of government he has depends entirely on the quality of that participation.

It is not only important but mentally invigorating to discuss political matters with people whose opinions differ radically from one’s own.

Above all, you can get the stimulation and challenge of disagreement and learn to test your beliefs and opinions, to re-examine them from a fresh viewpoint.