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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. They are a small part of the thing broadly known as culture.

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.

There is a wonderful word, why?, that children use. All children. When they stop using it, the reason, too often, is that no one bothered to answer them, no one tried to keep alive one of the most important attributes a person can have: interest in the world around him. No one fostered and cultivated the child’s innate sense of the adventure of life.

One of the things I believe most intensely is that every child’s why should be answered with care—and with respect. If you do not know the answer, and you often will not, then take the child with you to a source to find the answer. This may be a dictionary or encyclopedia which he is too young to use himself, but he will have had a sense of participation in finding the answer.

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. They will gravitate as automatically as the needle to the north. Somehow, it is unnecessary, in any cold-blooded sense, to sit down and put your head in your hands and plan them. All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there’s one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

This part of learning—learning as you go—gives life its salt. And this, too, comes back primarily to interest. You must be interested in anything that comes your way.

I think it is a tremendous loss to a child to grow up in a family without conversation. Naturally, there are always trivial things, plans and details to be talked over. But there should be general discussion of ideas as well, of the fantastic things that are happening all over the world, of new discoveries in science and archaeology, of local or distant problems and their possible solution, of anything that keeps before the child the realization that life is an exciting business, that it is to be approached in a spirit of adventure.

was always glad that my husband loved to have the boys argue with him. Often he demolished them in one statement, but the heated discussion was stimulating to them all. To this day the boys continue to argue with each other, finding a mutual stimulus in the exchange of ideas and opinions.

Perhaps the most essential thing for a continuing education is to develop the capacity to know what you see and to understand what it means. Many people seem to go through life without seeing. They do not know how to look around them. Only when you have learned that can you really continue to learn about people, about conditions, about your own locality.

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

But the withholding of information from a child either frustrates him or makes him seek it for himself. And the trouble with the latter method is that it is apt to make the child feel both guilty and dishonest.

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.

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.

I had to learn to face people and I could not do it so long as I was obsessed with fears about myself, which is the usual situation with shyness. I learned a liberating thing. 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.

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

Believers in progressive education feel that children can be led to the right thing by persuasion and reason, even at a very early age. In some cases, the child is not yet prepared to reason at an early age and the method is not successful. On the other hand, I remember one particular case in which I felt that, without question, if you had the patience and persuasiveness and did not mind making life difficult for everyone else around, this can be a wonderful way to bring up a child.

Today the world faces a great challenge: on one side a government preserved by fear, on the other a government of free men. I haven’t ever believed that anything supported by fear can stand against freedom from fear. Surely we cannot be so stupid as to let ourselves become shackled by senseless fears. The result of that would be to have a system of fear imposed on us. 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.

first, by achieving an inner calm so that I can work undisturbed by what goes on around me; second, by concentrating on the thing in hand; third, by arranging a routine pattern for my days that allots certain activities to certain hours, planning in advance for everything that must be done, but at the same time remaining flexible enough to allow for the unexpected. There is a fourth point which, perhaps, plays a considerable part in the use of my time. I try to maintain a general pattern of good health so that I have the best use of my energy whenever I need it.

It is possible, as I have discovered, to be relaxed and restful in spite of any amount of physical turmoil without. For a person who has a busy schedule which makes great demands on his time, this is an invaluable thing to acquire, because you will be able to use your time in the best possible way without being disturbed by every little thing, by having your nerves jangled or losing your trend of thought, or, most disrupting, fighting against and resenting the noise and the interruptions.

The second most important thing is to learn to concentrate, to give all your attention to the thing at hand, and then to be able to put it aside and go on to the next thing without confusion.

Actually, you can finish any task much quicker if you concentrate on it for fifteen minutes than if you give it divided attention for thirty.

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time.

I am constantly surprised to hear women say, “Now that my children have grown up and left home I don’t know what to do with myself. Life seems so empty.” How, they wonder, are they to find new interests, find something to fill the empty hours.

A woman cannot meet adequately the needs of those who are nearest to her if she has no interests, no friends, no occupations of her own.

Without them, she is in danger of becoming so dependent on her children for these things that she is apt to be equally dependent when they have left home. She may give them the uncomfortable feeling that she is languishing without their companionship and so make the time they can spend together an uneasy duty and not the pleasant occasion it should be.

There should never be a vacuum. Circumstances never create a vacuum. It is hostile to life. We create vacuums for ourselves by sheer apathy. If you can manage some connection with outside things, however fleeting and remote, your new leisure will expand your opportunity to plunge into them more intensively.

Now the the children are launched and, except in secondary ways, they no longer need their parents. And that is how it should be. If they still need you fundamentally, you have made them too dependent on you to face life alone. If you need them, you are too dependent.

It is true that when children have left the family environment, you are left alone but, as long as I can remember, I had a great variety of friends. 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.

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. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life.

“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.”

First, I think, is self-knowledge. One must be willing to have knowledge of oneself. You have to be honest with yourself. You must try to understand truthfully what makes you do things or feel things. Until you have been able to face the truth about yourself you cannot be really sympathetic or understanding in regard to what happens to other people. But it takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do.

There is a danger in this self-examination. Some people become so interested, so fascinated, by this voyage of self-discovery, that they don’t come out of it again. They remain completely absorbed in their self-study.

There is another ingredient of the maturing process that is almost as painful as accepting your own limitations and the knowledge of what you are unable to give. That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give you. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.

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.

Sometimes we are apt to regard as limitations qualities that are actually the other person’s strength. We may resent them because they are not the particular qualities which we may want the other person to have. The danger lies in the possibility that we will not accept the person as he is but try to make him over according to our own ideas.

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. Any one of us who tries to make someone over and force him into an image of what we think he should be, rather than encourage him to develop along his own lines, is doing a dangerous thing.

I have seen parents who use sarcasm and every kind of pressure they can bring to bear to change their children and force them into the pattern of which they approve. Sometimes I have seen parents make a tremendous effort to have their children become what they themselves had wanted to be and for some reason had failed to achieve. Or they may have a great, though unacknowledged, desire to hold the child close to them and, through the child, attain a sort of continuity with the future, and know their own work will be carried on. Sometimes they succeed, but at the cost of rebellion and the actual destruction of what was essentially individual in the person.

The only way in which we can really help people to develop is to let them do it themselves, trying to show them by demonstration, if we can, the things that are really needed. But to force anything upon an individual is rarely successful in helping him develop his own individuality.

We should not compare ourselves with others, certainly we should not imitate them. I have often noticed that the person who has followed his true bent has more self-respect than the one who has been forced into an alien mold. And without self-respect, few people are able to feel genuine respect for others.

Just as we must learn to accept the limitations of others, so we must learn never to demand of someone else what is not freely offered us. This can apply to one’s husband or wife, to one’s children, particularly after they have left home, to one’s friends. What is freely given in love or affection or companionship one should rightly rejoice in. But what is withheld one must not demand.

There are, of course, many ways of making such a demand, and the worst ways are not necessarily the overt ones, the open complaints, the querulous insistence. One can demand by implied appeals to sympathy and to duty, by...

This kind of demand is a form of spiritual blackmail and it sometimes develops into a ruthlessness, an emotional pressure which is essentially dishonest. It is not, unhappily, uncommon. People often refuse to recognize it in themselves. They regard themselves as abused, ill treated, neglected, everything, in fact, but what they are—attempting to get by force something that people are unwilling to give them. If they refuse to correct this tenden...